JUN    .S  1914 


i<. 


BR    45     .B63    191A 

Hart,    Samuel,    18A5-1917 

Faith   and    the    faith 


FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 


A  MANUAL  OF 

SHORT  DAILY  PRAYERS 

FOR  FAMILIES 

Compiled  by 
The  Rev.  SAMUEL  HART,  D.D. 


12mo.     Printed  in  red  and  black. 
Cloth.     $0.60  net. 


LONGMANS,    GREEN.     AN.D     CO. 


FAITH         I    ^"""^  "^  ^^^* 
AND  THE  FAITH 


W^t  i@oi)Ien  Hectureti  idi4 


By 

SAMUEL   HART 

DEAN    OF   BERKELEY   DIVIKITY   SCHOOL 


LONGMANS,    GREEN,    AND    CO. 

FOURTH  AVENUE  &  30TH  STREET,  NEW  YORK 
LONDON,   BOMBAY,    AND  CALCUTTA 

1914 


Copyright,  1914,  by 
SAMUEL  HART,  D.D. 


THE 
JOHN  BOHLEN  LECTURESHIP 

John  Bohlen,  who  died  in  this  city  on  the  twenty- 
sixth  day  of  April,  1874,  bequeathed  to  trustees  a 
fund  of  one  hundred  thousand  dollars,  to  be  dis- 
tributed to  religious  and  charitable  objects  in  accord- 
ance with  the  well-known  wishes  of  the  testator. 

By  a  deed  of  trust,  executed  June  2,  1875,  the 
trustees  under  the  will  of  Mr.  Bohlen  transferred 
and  paid  over  to  "The  Rector,  Church  Wardens, 
and  Vestrymen  of  the  Church  of  the  Holy  Trinity, 
Philadelphia,"  in  trust,  a  sum  of  money  for  certain 
designated  purposes,  out  of  which  fund  the  sum  of 
ten  thousand  dollars  was  set  apart  for  the  endow- 
ment of  The  John  Bohlen  Lectureship,  upon  the 
following  terms  and  conditions : — 

The  money  shall  be  invested  in  good  substantial  and  safe 
securities,  and  held  in  trust  for  a  fund  to  be  called  The  John 
Bohlen  Lectureship,  and  the  income  shall  be  applied  annually 
to  the  payment  of  a  qualified  person,  whether  clergyman  or 
layman,  for  the  delivery  and  publication  of  at  least  one  hun- 
dred copies  of  two  or  more  lecture  sermons.  These  Lectures 
shall  be  delivered  at  such  time  and  place,  in  the  city  of  Phila- 
delphia, as  the  persons  nominated  to  appoint  the  lecturer  shall 


THE  JOHN  BOHLEN  LECTURESHIP 

from  time  to  time  determine,  giving  at  least  six  months  notice 
to  the  person  appointed  to  deliver  the  same,  when  the  same 
may  conveniently  be  done,  and  in  no  case  selecting  the  same 
person  as  lecturer  a  second  time  within  a  period  of  five  years. 
The  payment  shall  be  made  to  said  lecturer,  after  the  lectures 
have  been  printed  and  received  by  the  trustees,  of  all  the 
income  for  the  year  derived  from  said  fund,  after  defraying 
the  expense  of  printing  the  lectures  and  the  other  incidental 
expenses  attending  the  same. 

The  subject  of  such  lectures  shall  be  such  as  is  within  the 
terms  set  forth  in  the  will  of  the  Rev.  John  Bampton,  for  the 
delivery  of  what  are  known  as  the  "Bampton  Lectures,"  at 
Oxford,  or  any  other  subject  distinctively  connected  with  or 
relating  to  the  Christian  Religion. 

The  lecturer  shall  be  appointed  annually  in  the  month  of 
May,  or  as  soon  thereafter  as  can  conveniently  be  done,  by  the 
persons  who,  for  the  time  being,  shall  hold  the  oflBces  of  Bishop 
of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  of  the  Diocese  in  which  is 
the  Church  of  the  Holy  Trinity;  the  Rector  of  said  Church; 
the  Professor  of  Biblical  Learning,  the  Professor  of  Sys- 
tematic Divinity,  and  the  Professor  of  Ecclesiastical  History, 
in  the  Divinity  School  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church  in 
Philadelphia. 

In  case  either  of  said  oflSces  are  vacant  the  others  may  nom- 
inate the  lecturer. 

Under  this  trust,  the  Reverend  Samuel  Hart,  D.D., 
LL.D.,  D.C.L.,  Dean  of  Berkeley  Divinity  School, 
Middletown,  Connecticut,  was  appointed  to  deliver 
the  lectures  for  the  year  1914. 


CONTENTS 

LECTURE  I 
FAITH 


PAGE 
1 


3 
5 
6 
9 
9 
10 
11 


Plan  and  Purpose      .... 
I.     New  Testament  uses  of  the  word 

Progress  in  its  apprehension     . 

in  the  Gospels,  fidelity  and  trust 
in  St.  Paul,  a  X^P^^^M^ 
in  Hebrews,  a  source  of  knowledge 
in  St.  John,  the  verb,  victory  and  life 

Faith,  the  principle  of  religion 

II.     Note    on    the    words     niarii,    -fides,    faith, 

belief,    trust 12 

Value  of  variety  in  words  .        .        .        .14 

III.     The  faith ;  use  of  the  article     .         .         .        •      14- 

Revisers'  stress  on  tenses  and  the  article     .      15 

exaggeration  of  distinctions         .         .        .17 

Examples  of  *  the  faith  ' 19 

question  as  to  meaning  ....  20 
it  does  not  mean  the  Creed  .        .        .21 

Jewish  priests  became  believers  ...  23 
St.  Paul  kept  his  belief  ....  23 
St.  Jude  bids  to  contend  for  belief      .        .      24 

IV.     Importance  of  faith 25 

and  of  its  expression 27 

*  the  faith  '  in  Latin  sense    ....  27 
vii 


viii  CONTENTS 


PAGE 


Faith  in  God;  -fides  qua  creditur, 

fides  cui  creditur     .         .         .28 

V.  Objects  of  faith  do  not  change  ...  29 
knowledge  of  them  grows  .  .  .  .29 
phraseology  may  alter,  but  not  truth         .      SO 

LECTURE  II 

FAITH  IN  GOD 

Faith  and  its  expression  .         .         .         .         .31 

I.     Faith  implies  a  personal  relation      ...      32 

Meaning  of  faith  in  a  person    .         .         .         .33 

All  faith  is  really  in  God  .         .         .33 

God  never  known  except  by  faith       .        .      34 

II.     How  we  have  come  to  faith  in  God  ...      35 

How  we  approve  faith  in  Him        .         .        .36 

But   faith   comes    from   Him   because    He    is     38 

Its  great  truth,  that  God  is  One    ...      40 

Not  an  easy  truth,  formerly  or  now        .      41 

III.     Jewish  monotheism  largely  henotheism  .        .  42 

And  failed  to  apprehend  integral  one-ness  43 
But  poets  and  prophets  gained  faith  in  one 

living  God 44 

Their  faith  in  the  Wisdom  or  Word  of  God 

and  in  the  Spirit  or  Life  of  God  .  .  45 
Seen  in  the  later  books  of  the  Canon  and  in 

extra-canonical  writings     ...  46 

Quickened   at   the   beginning   of   the   Gospel  48 

made  distinct  in  Christ's  teaching  .  50 
IV.     Faith  here  preceded  the  faith   .         .         .         .52 

inspired  by  reality,  leading  to  a  person  53 
The  Spirit  known  later  than  the  Son,  though 

we  might  expect  the   contrary  54 

This  is  pure  faith,  in  thought,  life,  knowledge  56 


CONTENTS  ix 

PAOE 

V.  The  varied  contents  of  our  Creed  .  .  .57 
But  all  are  matters  of  faith  .  .  .  .58 
Why  the  Church  believed  the  Divine  Son  and 

Spirit^  that  God  is  indeed  living  and  real     58 
The  Creed  followed  upon  faith       ...      60 


LECTURE  III 

FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST 

Truth    made    known    by    faith    expressed    in 
words ; 
The  use  of  words  as  symbols      ...61 
I.     Matters  of  history  and  of  observation 

may  lead  to  questioning  and  inference 
This  is  the  working  of  faith  and  reason 
The  doctrine  of  the  Word 

leads  to  that  of  His  Incarnation 
II.     The  life  of  Jesus  Christ  on  earth 

Questions  about  Him;  He  was  certainly 
But  He  claimed  to  be  more  than  man 
What  the  Twelve  believed  of  Him  . 

and  what  they  said 

What  Paul  believed  and  said  . 

Faith  preceded  the  faith  . 

and  prepared  for  it     . 

III.     Faith  real,  though  not  clearly  defined 

The  Sermon  on  the  Mount 

The  title  of  Son  of  Man      . 

Christ's    question    and    Peter's    confession     80 

IV.     Connection  of  the  Messiah  and  the  Son  of  God     82 

Earliest  revelation  of  this     . 

The  certainty   of  it  soon  seen 

V.     Teaching  of  the  theology  of  John  and  Paul 

All  did  not  learn  in  the  same  way   . 

Formulas  not  to  be  depreciated     . 


62 
64 
65 
66 
67 
man  69 
70 
71 
72 
73 
75 
77 
78 
78 
79 


83 

84 
86 
87 
88 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Possible  need  of  modification  ....      89 
The  truth  ever  the  same 90 


LECTURE  IV 
FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT 


The  Spirit,  the  Life  of  God   . 

I.     Revealed  in  early  days    .... 
in  psalms  and  prophecies    . 
and  in  expectation        .... 
Assumed  in  earliest  parts  of  Gospels 

in  all  teachings  of  Christ  and  His  Apostles 
His  revelation  in  a  Body  .... 

11.     This  the  dispensation  of  the  Spirit  . 

Its  beginning  attended  by  wonderful  acts  and 

words 

The  balance  between  freedom  and  order 

St.   Paul  to  the   Corinthians 
The  strangeness  of  the  new  world 

III.      1.  The  Spirit  of  faith      .... 
Faith  one  of  His  greatest  gifts 
and  the  test  of  all  seeming  gifts    . 
2.  Faith  in  the  Spirit 

recognized  as   a  person  . 
personally  given  and  acting    . 

IV.     Yet  this  faith  not  defined 

The  third  part  of  the  Creed    . 
No  additions  to  it  at  Niceea  . 
The  additions  at  Chalcedon 
The  Spirit  is  not  fully  revealed 
and  confession  follows  revelation 


91 

92 
93 
93 
94 
95 
96 

97 

97 

99 

100 

101 

102 
103 
104 

106 
107 

108 
108 
109 
110 
111 
112 


CONTENTS 


XI 


PAGE 


East  and  West  not  in  agreement  as  to  the 

Procession 113 

Have  we  yet  a   full  knowledge  of   Him  by 

faith? 114 

V.     The  Faith  as  to  the  Spirit  waiting  for  com- 
plete faith  in  the  Spirit       .         .        .        .115 
An  undefined  faith  shown  in  Church,  Scrip- 
tures,  Sacraments,   sanctification        .         .116 
Increase    in   the    use    of    gifts    prepares    for 
the  revelation  of  the  future        .        .        .117 


LECTURE  V 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH 

Life  grows  out  of  Faith  and  Faith  leads  to 
confession      ..... 
I.     Faith  has  to  do  with  the  life  of  the  soul 
Shown  in  Hebrews  xi. 
in  St.  John 
in  St.  Paul 

II.     The  life  of  the  soul  is  God's  gift 

in  the  stages  of  creation     . 

in  the  process  of  salvation  . 

traced  God-ward  and  man-ward 
conversion,  salvation,  victory  . 

III.     The  life  of  the  soul  is  sacramental 

The  sacramental  idea  . 

in  nature,  in  thought     . 

in  the  soul     

The  Sacraments  of  the  Gospel  call  for  faith 

however  they  are  regarded . 
So  every  act  of  Christian  life    . 


118 

119 
120 
121 
121 

122 
123 
124 
125 
126 

128 
129 
ISO 
130 

131 
133 


xii  CONTENTS 

IV.     This  sacramental  life  cannot  be  defined 
Beliefs  lie  beneath  words 

and  agree  when  words  are  at  variance 
In  all  sacramental  acts     .... 


PAGE 

134> 
135 
136 
137 


V.     Individual  faith  and  organic  utterance     .         .138 

in  Creeds 139 

in  worship  and  ordinances    .         .         .         .140 
where  words  of  controversy  have  no  place   141 

The   faith  uttered  attempts  to  express   faith 
which  already  exists 142 

Value  of  old  terms,  which  will  continue  .         .143 
but  must  not  hinder  generosity  of  expres- 
sion    .         .         .         .         .         .         .         .144 

Faith  shall  ever  endure 144 


LECTURE  I 
FAITH 

St.  Luke  xviii.  8. 

apa  evpi/aec  ttjv  ttIgtiv  knl  ryg  yijq ; 
"  Shall  he  find  faith  on  the  earth?  " 

[Margin  of  revised  versions;  "  Shall  he  find  the  faith 
on  the  earth?  "] 

The  form  of  the  title  of  these  lectures, 
you  will  note,  is  borrowed  from  that  of  a 
recent  series  of  the  Bampton  Lectures.  My 
purpose,  however,  is  not  to  attempt  to  follow 
either  the  method  or  the  argument  of  these 
discourses  on  Creed  and  the  Creeds;  to  at- 
tempt to  do  so  would  be  presumptuous  in 
the  extreme.  It  is  rather  my  desire  to 
inquire  into  the  relation  of  Faith,  in  the 
varied  New  Testament  and  theological  uses 
of  the  word,  to  what  we  have  come  to  know 
as  the  Faith — that  is  to  say  the  statement, 
in  creeds  or  other  received  formularies,  of 
certain  great  doctrines  held  and  taught  by 


S  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

the  Christian  Church.  The  full  consideration 
and  study  of  the  inquiry  thus  propounded 
would  require  more  time  than  is  assigned  to 
these  lectures  and  far  more  learning  and 
thought  than  the  lecturer  has  at  his  com- 
mand; but  it  will  not  be  amiss,  I  venture 
to  say,  to  state  the  question  which  the  topic 
presents,  to  point  out  certain  lines  along 
which  we  can  look  for  its  clear  enunciation 
and  perhaps  for  its  answer,  and  to  suggest 
certain  applications  to  our  study  and  our 
teaching  of  great  intellectual  and  practical 
truths. 

If  to-day  I  may  ask  your  attention  to 
the  consideration  of  what  is  immediately  sug- 
gested by  the  subject  stated,  I  shall  hope 
in  the  lectures  which  follow  to  make  special 
applications  to  the  Christian  teaching  in 
regard  to  the  Nature  of  God,  the  Incarna- 
tion of  the  Word,  the  Work  of  the  Spirit, 
and  the  Life  of  the  Christian.  May  the 
Spirit  of  truth  and  of  discipline  inspire  our 
minds  and  guide  our  thoughts  and  lead  us 
in  the  path  of  truth  I 


FAITH  8 


^  No  form  of  words  is  sufficient  to  define 
faith,  as  no  study  of  words  is  sufficient  to 
explain  it.  ^  When  asked  for  a  definition, 
we  repeat  the  first  verse  of  the  wonderful 
chapter  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews  in 
which  heroes  of  faith  are  honored  and  tri- 
umphs of  faith  rehearsed;  when  bidden  to 
tell  of  its  place  in  the  life  of  the  soul  of 
man,  we  recall  what  the  great  Apostle  taught 
as  to  the  righteousness  of  man  derived  by 
it  from  the  righteousness  of  God.  Or  per- 
chance, without  offering  a  definition,  we  go 
back  to  the  words  in  which  the  Evangelists 
have  preserved  the  Lord's  teaching  as  to 
the  power  and  the  results  of  faith  in  Him- 
self and  in  the  Father,  or  we  look  at  the 
later  words  of  the  beloved  disciple  who  tells 
of  the  energy  of  faith  as  it  reaches  into  the 
world  unseen  and  brings  its  power  into  this 
world  of  things  seen  and  recreates  it.  From 
such  a  review,  covering  the  whole  of  the  New 
Testament  revelation,  we  gain  an  inspiration 
of  belief  and  of  action;  but  we  do  not  thus 
obtain     the     definition     which     for     careful 


4  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

thought  we  need.  And  we  but  confuse  our- 
selves when  we  carry  the  words  of  one  sacred 
writer  without  adaptation  into  the  teaching 
of  another,  or  read  a  lesson  of  practical  duty 
as  if  it  were  a  formal  setting  forth  of  doc- 
trinal truth,  or  quote  a  text  without  looking 
back  to  see  how  it  is  introduced  and  read- 
ing on  to  learn  the  application  which  is 
made  of  it,  or  take  any  item  in  a  progressive 
revelation — and  the  revelation  of  the  New 
Testament,  as  really  as  that  of  the  Old,  is 
progressive — as  if  it  closed  the  statement  of 
that  element  of  truth  with  which  it  has  to 
do.  The  synoptic  Evangelists  could  not  have 
taught  explicitly  St.  Paul's  doctrine  of  justi- 
fication by  faith;  St.  Paul  could  not  have 
written  the  definition  of  faith  which  is  given 
in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews;  the  writer  of 
that  Epistle  could  not  have  expressed  a 
conviction  of  the  regenerating  and  new- 
creating  power  of  belief  in  the  phraseology 
of  St.  John.  We  may  well  learn  from  the 
sacred  writers  how  simple  thoughts  and 
words  are  the  only  possible  introduction  to 
full  knowledge   and  profound  utterances   of 


FAITH  6 

great  truths;  we  may  also  learn  from  them 
how,  in  knowledge  and  in  utterance  and  in 
life  as  well,  we  should  carry  ourselves  along 
towards  perfection. 

Let  us  look,  then,  at  the  progress  which 
we  can  discern  in  men's  apprehension  of 
the  meaning  of  Faith.  In  the  Old  Testa- 
ment it  has  already,  as  the  Hebrew  word 
in  different  modes  implies,  both  the  care  of 
one  who  carries  a  child  in  the  arms  and 
the  trustfulness  of  the  child  who  is  thus 
safely  carried,  the  meaning  of  trust  and 
that  of  trustworthiness,  the  belief  of  one  who 
takes  another  at  his  word  and  the  fidelity 
of  one  who  has  given  his  word.  "  Faithful 
Abraham,"  convinced  of  the  faithfulness  of 
the  God  whom  he  had  come  to  know,  became 
the  father  of  all  those  who  have  faith;  so  the 
record  of  ancient  times  is  interpreted  for  us 
by  an  Apostle  of  the  New  Covenant.*  "  The 
righteous  man  finds  life  by  reason  of  his 
fidelity  " ;  so  the  utterance  of  a  prophet  of 
far  later  day  furnishes  a  text  for  the  preach- 
ing of  the  same  Apostle.t 

*  Genesis  xv.  6;   Romans  iv.  11. 
t  Hebrews  ii.  4;  Romans  i.  17. 


6  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

And  this  twofold  use  of  the  word  is  found 
in  the  New  Testament  even  in  the  simple 
records  of  the  beginnings  of  its  revelation. 
The  "  faith  "  of  the  early  evangelistic  records 
is  sometimes  man's  fidelity  to  a  trust,  trust- 
worthiness, fides  in  its  classical  sense;  as  for 
instance,  in  the  Lord's  enumeration  of  justice 
and  mercy  and  faith  as  the  weightier  mat- 
ters of  the  law  or  in  His  commendation  of 
the  faithful  and  prudent  steward.*  But  it 
is  more  often  man's  trust  in  the  heavenly 
Father  or  in  Christ  Himself,  fiducia  as  it 
would  be  accurately  expressed  in  Latin,  as 
over  and  again  we  read  that  the  Lord  acted 
on  His  sight  or  His  knowledge  or  recognition 
of  men's  confidence  in  Him,  or  that  He 
lamented  their  lack  of  that  confidence  with- 
out which  His  power  could  not  fully  act.t 
Whether  in  a  few  cases  the  word  is  so  used 
as  to  imply  or  look  towards  a  different  sense, 
we  must  consider  later. 

It  is  in  St.  Paul  that  we  find  this  sense 
of  fiducia,  of  trust  in  a  divine  person,  made 
a   foundation-stone    of   theological    teaching. 

*  Matthew  xxiii.  23,  xxiv.  45. 

f  E.  g.,  Matthew  ix.  2,  xiii.  58,  xvii.  20. 


FAITH  7 

Although  it  is  certainly  an  error  to  affirm 
that  St.  Paul  made  the  doctrine  of  justifica- 
tion by  Faith,  articulus  (whether  we  trans- 
late it  "an  article"  or  "the  article")  stantis 
vel  cadentis  ecclesiae,  or  that  he  built  all 
teaching  as  to  Christian  belief  or  conduct 
upon  it,  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  both 
negatively  and  positively  he  deemed  it  of 
great  importance  that  this  doctrine  should 
be  held  and  taught.  It  involves  so  much  in 
itself,  it  touches  upon  so  many  other  things 
which  concern  truth  and  duty,  it  had  so 
powerful  an  influence  upon  himself  in  his 
religious  experience,  it  was  by  him  so  ear- 
nestly applied,  that  we  cannot  wonder  that 
the  faith  by  which  we  believe  {fides  qua 
creditur)  should  stand  forth  as  a  principle 
and  foundation  of  Christian  life  for  all  the 
generations  to  which  the  influence  of  the 
great  Apostle  can  reach. 

But  when  the  definition  of  faith  came 
from  the  lips  or  the  pen  of  the  author  of 
the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews,  it  is  evident  that 
an  advance  had  been  made  in  Christian 
thought  on  this  subject.  He  drew  his  argu- 
ment,   we   cannot    but   remember,    from    the 


8  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

same  words  in  the  prophet  Habakkuk 
which  had  been  to  St.  Paul  the  starting- 
point  of  his  argument  as  to  the  faith 
through  which  comes  justification  or  right- 
eousness. "  The  righteous  man  shall  have 
life  through  his  fidelity — his  faithfulness. 
We  are  men  of  fidelity  for  getting  pos- 
session  of   soul TtLatEQDi    €l?    7t£f)l7toit]GlV     tpVXV^ 

— ^men  of  faith  for  acquirement  of  person- 
ality " ;  *  we  can  think  the  meaning  better 
than  we  can  express  it.  And  then,  as  by  a 
sudden  inspiration  which  passed  beyond  the 
bound  of  former  thought,  but  for  which 
former  thought  had  prepared,  the  writer 
gives  us,  not  so  much  a  definition  after  all, 
but  a  lesson  as  to  what  faith  is  and  does: 
Effrir  de  Ttiarii  iXni^opLevoov  vnoGtaGi'i,  npay- 
juatGDv sXsyxo? ov /SXsTtojuivGDv,  "But  faith  ex- 
ists as  reality  of  what  we  hope  for,  as  proof 
of  things  that  we  cannot  look  at";  "Faith 
assures  us  that  the  objects  of  our  hopes  have 
a  foundation,  that  things  which  we  cannot 
test  by  our  senses  are  real."  t 

With  such  words  this  writer,   in  his  mo- 

*  Hebrews  x.  38,  39. 
t  Hebrews  xi.  1. 


FAITH  9 

ment  of  lofty  inspiration,  declares  that  the 
faith  of  fidelity  and  trust  is  a  source  of 
knowledge,  bringing  truth  to  the  soul  as 
really  as  the  eye  brings  truth  to  the  mind. 
That  which  to  St.  Paul  is  a  *  grace ' 
(xapKTjua),  a  condition  of  right  spiritual 
relations,  is  to  him  a  means  of  revelation  of 
the  unseen;  it  is  an  assurance  of  the  reality 
of  what  has  entered  the  soul  as  hope;  it  is 
a  proof  that  some  things  are  true  which 
are  beyond  the  limits  of  perception  by  the 
senses.  And  this  is  the  faith  which  is,  as 
Bishop  Westcott  has  taught  us,  in  things 
seemingly  small  as  in  things  certainly  great, 
a  principle  of  knowledge,  a  principle  of 
power,  a  principle  of  action.*  It  is  not  at 
all  difficult  to  see  that  a  large  part  of  the 
acts  of  our  lives  are  regulated  by  faith, 
while  we  are  sure  that  from  it  come  all  our 
most  profound  learning  and  all  our  bravest 
deeds,  so  that  upon  it  depends  all  that  is 
rightly  called  character  with  all  that  char- 
acter implies. 

St.  John  in  his  writings  rarely  speaks  of 
faith;   outside   of  the  Apocalypse    (where  it 

*  The  Historic  Faith,  I. 


10  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

occurs  in  a  few  notable  places  *)  he  uses  the 
noun  but  once,  and  that  is  when  he  bids 
us  remember  that  faith  is  the  victory  which 
is  victorious  over  the  world.t  But  as  I  do 
not  need  to  remind  you,  he  uses  the  cognate 
verb  which  we  are  forced  to  translate  by 
*  believe '  over  and  over  again.  We  recall 
how  at  the  beginning  of  his  Gospel  he  speaks 
of  blessings  which  come  to  those  who  believe 
on  the  name  of  the  incarnate  Word;  how 
he  records  the  Lord's  declaration  that  the 
l6ve  of  God  had  sent  His  Son  into  the  world 
that  all  who  believe  in  Him  should  have 
eternal  life;  how  he  has  preserved  for  us 
Christ's  high-priestlj^  prayer  with  its  lofty 
petition  for  all  who  at  any  time  should  be- 
lieve in  Him;  and  how  in  his  Epistle  he 
touches  in  every  way  on  the  blessedness  and 
power  of  believing,  even  more  emphatically 
than  St.  Paul  dwells  on  the  efficacy  of 
faith.l  And  St.  John's  conception  of  be- 
lieving is,  I  think,  plainly  shown  by  the  fact 
that  he  makes  this  constant  use  of  the  verb. 
Believing  is  for  him  an  act  of  life,  or  rather 

*  E.  g.,  ii.  12,  xiii.  10.  f  I.  John  v.  4. 

$  John  i.  12,  iii.  16,  xvii.  20;  I.  John  iii.  23. 


FAITH  11 

in  his  conviction  spiritual  life  consists  in  be- 
lieving. We  see  this  in  his  record  of  the 
lofty  teaching  of  the  sacramental  discourse 
based  on  the  miracle  of  feeding  the  multitude 
in  the  wilderness:  "He  that  belie veth  hath 
eternal  life  " ;  and  with  like  words  he  draws 
to  the  end  of  his  longest  Epistle:  "Who  is 
he  that  overcometh  the  world  but  he  that 
believeth?"  "Ye  have  eternal  life,  ye  who 
believe  in  ( ei^ )  the  name  of  the  Son  of 
God."  *  ^ 

Thus  faith  is  shown  to  be  the  very  prin- 
ciple of  Christ's  religion,  and  (we  may  ven- 
ture to  say)  of  all  that  is  true  in  any  religion. 
Beginning  with  fidelity,  passing  to  confi- 
dence and  trustfulness — no  mean  qualities, 
these — it  shows  itself  a  source  of  knowledge 
and  proves  itself  a  life.  It  stands  high 
among  God's  gifts  to  us,  having  as  superior 
to  itself  only  that  supreme  gift  of  reason 
by  which  man  must  test  the  truth  of  every- 
thing which  is  presented  to  the  mind  or  the 
spirit;  it  crowns  humanity  with  a  beauty  all 
its  own,  it  looks  with  assurance  for  the  ful- 
filment of  ever  widening  hope,  it  proves  the 

♦  John  vi.  47 ;  I.  John  v.  5,  13. 


12  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

reality  of  the  things  not  seen  which  are  the 
things  eternal. 

II 

I  may  be  pardoned  for  inserting  here, 
almost  by  way  of  parenthesis,  a  note  as  to 
the  imperfection  of  our  language  and  the 
consequent  crippling  of  our  thought  in  re- 
gard to  faith.  In  English  we  have  the  noun 
which  not  only  translates  but  represents  the 
Greek  word  for  '  faith ' ;  it  comes  to  us 
through  the  Latin,  which  has  ultimately  the 
same  stem  as  the  word  used  by  the  New 
Testament  writers.  And  the  meaning  of  that 
stem  {ni^-,  fid-)  is  exactly  that  which  lies  at 
the  basis  of  the  interpretation  and  extension 
of  interpretation  which  we  have  been  thus  far 
considering.  Its  ancient  meaning  was  to 
*  bind  ' ;  in  fact  '  bind  '  is  another  word  from 
the  same  stem,  and  thus  jides,  whence  came  the 
French  joy  or  joi  and  the  English  jey  now 
lengthened  into  jaiih,  is  connected  in  signifi- 
cation with  the  generally  accepted  derivation 
of  religio,  that  which  binds  together  or  per- 
haps '  obliges '  us  to  duty.  But  we  have 
no  English  verb  corresponding  to  faith,   as 


FAITH  13 

the  Greeks  have  nwrsveiv  and  the  Latins 
fidere.  For  lack  thereof  we  are  forced  to 
borrow  from  another  stem  the  verb  '  believe,' 
which  indeed  serves  our  purpose  fairly  well, 
but  which  hinders  the  unity  and  continuity 
of  our  thought.  We  cannot  without  an  effort 
make  the  nouns  '  faith '  and  *  belief '  mean 
exactly  the  same;  nor  should  we  be  willing 
to  substitute  the  latter  for  the  former  in 
reading  and  studying  the  Bible.  The  stem 
of  'belief  after  the  prefix  be-  (or  ge-)  is 
that  which  still  appears  in  our  colloquial 
word  for  choice ;  that  is  '  lief '  which  we 
desire  or  like,  or  that  which  we  deem  val- 
uable, and  then  that  in  which  we  are  willing 
to  place  our  confidence;  and,  whether  we 
think  of  the  derivation  or  not,  it  is  not  easy 
to  make  the  verb  which  we  are  forced  to 
use  correspond  to  the  noun  which  it  seems 
to  us  we  naturally  use.  We  believe  many 
assertions  which  are  in  no  wise  matters  of 
faith;  we  believe  many  persons  of  whom  we 
should  not  be  willing  to  say  that  we  have 
faith  in  them  or  even  (and  here  we  have 
made  in  following  the  ancients  an  important 
difference)    that  we  believe  in  them.     There 


14  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

is  still  a  third  word  which  is  both  verb  and 
noun,  and  which  in  its  form  as  in  its  use 
betokens  truth  and  in  its  derivation  means 
belief,  the  word  *  trust ' ;  it  is  a  good  and 
strong  word,  but  it  does  not  carry  with  it 
now  a  sacred  connotation.  There  is  value 
of  a  certain  kind  in  this  variety  of  words 
and  of  sounds,  a  value  which  good  trans- 
lators into  English — notably  those  who  have 
given  us  our  vernacular  Bible  and  Prayer 
Book — have  discerned  and  have  commended 
to  us.  But,  on  the  other  hand,  one  has  to 
regret  that,  in  writing  on  faith  and  study- 
ing its  divine  meaning,  we  are  forced  to 
use  a  verb  which  gives  neither  the  sound 
nor  the  equivalent  signification  of  the  noun 
which  is  constantly  employed.  Let  this, 
however,  serve  for  apology;  we  return  to 
the  consideration  of  New  Testament  teaching. 


Ill 


Our  study  of  the  use  of  the  noun  *  faith  ' 
and  the  verb  '  believe,'  or  rather  of  the 
Greek  words  which  they  represent,  in  the 
New  Testament,  brings  us  to  the  considera- 


FAITH  15 

tion  of  the  meaning  of  the  word  '  faith ' 
when  in  Greek  it  has,  and  when  in  English 
it  ought  to  have,  the  article.  Is  the  mean- 
ing of  The  Faith  distinctly  different  from 
that  of  Faith  ?  Does  '  the  faith  '  ever  mean 
in  the  New  Testament  the  Creed  or  the  sub- 
stance of  the  Creed,  the  statement  of  truths 
or  doctrines  believed,  as  when  in  the  Cate- 
chism the  child  is  bidden  to  rehearse  the 
Articles  of  his  Belief?  The  answer  to  the 
question  must  be  based,  in  part  at  least,  on 
technical  considerations,  but  it  is  certainly 
important  and  not  without  interest  to  the 
student. 

It  does  no  injustice  to  the  learning  of 
the  recent  revisers  of  the  current  English 
version  of  the  New  Testament  to  say  that 
in  many  cases  they  have  held  so  closely  to 
the  form  of  the  Greek  text  that  they  have 
failed  to  present  with  exactness  its  meaning 
in  English.  In  fact,  it  seems  certain  that 
they  were  so  familiar  with  the  original,  and 
had  it  so  constantly  in  their  minds,  that  it 
required  an  effort  for  them  to  consider  just 
how  it  should  be  presented  in  a  translation 
into   our   language;    they   thought   the   New 


16  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

Testament    more    easily    in    Greek    than    in 
their   mother    tongue.      Thus    they    seem    to 
have  labored  to  represent  the  Greek  perfect 
tense  by  the  English  form  which  bears  the 
same  name,  and  the  aorist  tense  by  the  simple 
past  of  our  language.     Of  course,  they  could 
not   do   this   always;   unavoidable    considera- 
tions of  sense  sometimes  forbade;  but  they 
did    it    in    many    places    where    a    man    or 
woman  in  the  habit  of  reading  and  speak- 
ing   good    English,    yet    unacquainted    with 
the  classics,  would  instinctively  make  a  cor- 
rection, and  where  such  a  one  when  he  hears 
it  read  in  the  revised  version  knows  that  a 
correction    ought    to    be    made.      Tenses    do 
not    run    parallel    in    languages    of    diverse 
moulds,  and  they  cannot  be  made  so  to  run. 
It  is  largely  thus   with   the   article,    though 
here  the  error  is  oftener  inherited  from  the 
old  version  than  .in  the   case  of  the  tenses. 
The  Greek  uses  it  in  cases  where  it  is  not 
in  the  least   emphatic,   but   is   rather   "  con- 
tinuous," denoting  a  former,  often  anarthrous, 
use  of  the  word  to  which  it  is  prefixed,  and 
has  the  form  of  a  mild  demonstrative;  and 
from  this  it  gets  a  sort  of  unemphatic  pos- 


FAITH  17 

sessive  force,  so  that  it  is  best  rendered  by 
such  a  possessive.  Besides  this,  there  are 
cases  in  which  nouns  without  the  article, 
especially  those  which  have  by  some  sort 
of  personification  gained  the  qualities  of 
"  proper  "  nouns,  have  thus  become  emphatic. 
An  example  of  the  fact  that  both  the  use 
and  the  omission  of  the  article  may  give  a 
distinctive  meaning  is  seen  in  the  two  pas- 
sages in  the  book  of  the  Acts  in  which  we 
learn  of  the  gift  of  the  Holy  Spirit  by 
means  of  the  laying-on  of  the  Apostles' 
hands.  We  read  in  the  eighth  chapter  that 
Peter  and  John  prayed  for  the  baptized 
converts  at  Samaria  that  they  might  receive 
Holy  Spirit  (Ttvevpia  ayiov),  and  that  when 
they  had  laid  their  hands  upon  them  they 
did  receive  Holy  Spirit;  that  Simon  Magus 
saw  that  by  their  imposition  of  hands  the 
Spirit  {ro  7tv€v/xa)  was  given,  and  thereupon 
asked  that  he  might  buy  the  power  of  con- 
ferring Holy  Spirit  (Ttvevfxa  ayiov).*  But 
later,  in  the  nineteenth  chapter,  we  read  that 
St.  Paul  questioned  some  disciples  at 
Ephesus,  asking  them  if  when  they  became 

*  Acts  viii.  15,  18,  19. 


18  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

disciples  they  received  Holy  Spirit  (Ttvevpia 
ayiov),  and  that  they  confessed  that  they 
did  not  then  hear  of  Holy  Spirit;  where- 
upon he  laid  hands  on  them  and  the  Holy 
Spirit  {ro  Tcvevfxa  ro  ayiov)  came  upon  them.* 
It  certainly  is  not  true  here,  however  it 
may  look  in  other  cases,  that,  as  applied 
to  the  Spirit  of  God,  the  word  7rvevfj.a  with 
the  article  means  His  Person  and  without  the 
article  designates  His  operation  upon  the 
souls  of  men.t  Again,  one  who  reads  the 
earlier  chapters  of  the  Epistle  to  the  Romans, 
accepting  as  invariable  the  canon  that  rofxoi 
means  law  in  general  and  6  vojuo?  means  the 
law  given  to  the  Jews,  the  Mosaic  law,  will 
find  that  the  canon,  helpful  as  it  is  in  the  study 
of  some  important  passages,  fails  in  others 
which  are  more  difficult  even  if  perhaps  less 
important.  Nojuo?  does  sometimes  mean  the 
law  given  to  the  Israelites  by  Moses;  6  vojxoi 
may  mean  God's  general  dispensation 
through  law.J  In  the  Epistle  to  the  Gala- 
tians   we  find   an   example   of  what   I   have 

♦Acts  xix.  2,  6. 

t  See,  however,  Milligan,  Ascension,  etc.,  pp.  204,  199. 
%  Galatians  iii.  17  ff.,  where  both  the  English  and  the  Amer- 
ican revisers  translate  vdfioq  by  *  the  law.' 


FAITH  19 

called  the  distinctive  article  applied  to  vofxo? 
followed  presently  by  a  like  use  with  the 
word  TTiffri?,  which  will  serve  to  bring  our 
thoughts  back  to  what  we  were  saying  about 
this  word.  "  The  law,  being  later  than  the 
covenant,"  says  St.  Paul,  "  cannot  annul 
the  covenant.  The  inheritance  did  not  spring 
out  of  law;  the  law  was  brought  in  for 
transgressions'  sake,"  and  so  on.*  He  speaks 
with  a  perfectly  natural  common-sense  use 
or  omission  of  the  article,  according  as  he 
needs  it  or  does  not  need  it  for  the  carrying 
on  of  his  argument,  which  is  no  less  forceful 
because  it  is  colloquial.  From  this,  as  so 
often,  he  passes  to  speak  of  faith.  "  All  are 
reckoned  sinners  in  Scripture,  in  order  that 
the  promise  through  faith  (Sia  Trlffrsajg)  of 
Jesus  Christ  might  be  given  to  those  who 
have  faith  {toi?  maravovaiv).  But  before  the 
faith  {rriy  niariv)  came  we  were  kept  in  ward 
under  law  {vno  vojaov)/'  t  and  so  on.  Has  the 
word  '  faith,'  then,  by  being  spoken  or  read 


*  In  Romans  ii.  12-15,  the  English  revisers  distinguish  be- 
tween v6fj.oc  and  6  v6fiog ;  the  American  revisers  go  back  to  the 
old  version  and  say  always  *  the  law.' 

f  Galatians  iii.  22,  23. 


20  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

with  the  article,  passed  into  a  new  meaning? 
Islo  one,  I  suppose,  would  claim  that  it  is  so 
in  every  case;  yet  it  is  almost  impossible  for 
any  one  of  us  when  he  hears  of  '  the  faith ' 
to  think  otherwise  than  that  the  Creed — or 
what  is  substantially  the  Creed — is  meant. 
Take  the  Lord's  words  at  end  of  His  short 
parable  of  the  Importunate  Widow:  "When 
the  Son  of  man  cometh,  shall  He  find  faith 
on  the  earth? "  Whatever  the  context,  we 
understand  by  this  rendering  of  the  words 
that  the  Speaker  suggests  that  at  His  return 
faith — belief  in  God  and  trust  in  Him,  the 
quality  of  fidelity  and  the  grace  which  jus- 
tifies— ^will  have  been  sadly  weakened  even 
if  it  has  not  disappeared.  But  read  it,  as 
the  revisers  in  the  margin  read  it,  because 
the  Greek  word  for  *  faith '  has  the  article, 
"  When  the  Son  of  Man  cometh,  will  He 
find  the  faith  on  the  earth?"  and  it  would 
require  a  mental  effort  to  persuade  ourselves 
that  it  is  not  implied  that  at  the  last  there 
shall  be  danger  of  a  loss  of  acceptance  of 
the  formulas  of  Christian  belief  and  of  neg- 
lect to  confess  the  fundamental  truths  of 
the  Christian  religion.     As  we  have  been  in 


FAITH  21 

the  habit  of  reading  the  words,  they  urge 
us  to  hold  fast  to  faith;  as  it  is  suggested 
that  we  may  read  them,  they  warn  us  against 
the  loss  of  the  Creed.  Either  would  be  a 
great  and  grievous  calamity,  and  either  would 
to  a  serious  extent  involve  the  other;  but 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  if  we  would 
keep  the  exact  meaning  of  the  Lord's  warn- 
ing we  must  read,  not  '  the  faith,'  but  '  faith.' 
The  revisers  merely  meant  to  tell  us  that 
there  is  an  article  in  the  text — a  fact  which 
does  not  concern  the  ordinary  reader. 

I  have  made  these  excuses  by  way  of  in- 
troducing a  really  important  question  as 
to  the  meaning  of  certain  passages  in  the 
New  Testament  which  are  generally  thought 
to  apply  the  words  '  the  faith '  to  the  Creed 
or  what  was  practically  its  equivalent  in  the 
early  days.  When  we  read,  early  in  the 
Acts  of  the  Apostles,  that  "  a  great  multi- 
tude of  the  [Jewish]  priests  were  giving 
their  obedience  to  the  faith,"  *  it  seems  al- 
most to  tell  us  that  they  were  making  pro- 
fession of  Christianity  in  some  set  form  of 
words.     Further,  when  we  find  St.  Paul  de- 

*  Acts  vi.  7. 


22  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

daring,  as  he  awaits  the  martyr's  death  and 
the  martyr's  crown,  "  I  have  fought  the 
good  fight,  I  have  finished  the  course,  I 
have  kept  the  faith,"  *  he  seems  to  be  bearing 
witness  not  only  to  his  fulfilment  of  duty 
as  a  disciple  in  the  conflict  and  race  of  life 
but  also  to  his  maintenance  of  Christian 
doctrine  as  a  preacher  and  apostle.  Still 
more,  when  we  find  an  apostolic  man  of  the 
second  generation — for  such  we  may  think 
the  writer  of  St.  Jude's  Epistle  to  have 
been — urging  upon  his  disciples  the  duty  of 
**  contending  for  the  faith  which  was  in  one 
act  delivered  to  the  saints,"  t  most  of  us  feel 
quite  sure  that  we  have  a  proof  of  the  early 
existence  of  a  formula  known  as  "  the  faith," 
so  early  indeed  that  it  must  have  come  from 
literally  apostolic  days.  Now,  we  can  hardly 
doubt  that  from  the  very  first  there  must 
have  been  some  confession  of  belief  on  the 
part  of  those  who  came  to  be  baptized,  as 
in  the  ancient  form  of  words  "  I  believe 
that  Jesus  Christ  is  the  Son  of  God";  and 
it  is  practically  certain  that  we  can  trace 
back   to   the   close   of   the   first   century   the 

♦  II.  Timothy  iv.  7.  f  Jude  3. 


FAITH  23 

essentials  of  the  more  full  formula  which 
we  call  the  Apostles'  Creed.  But  it  seems 
quite  certain  that  "  the  faith  "  in  the  Scrip- 
tures is  not  used  in  a  sense  which  passes 
beyond  what  we  have  noted  in  the  Gospels 
and  the  Epistles  as  its  simple  and  normal 
but  progressive  meaning. 

Look  at  the  texts  which  have  just  been 
quoted.  When  the  official  leaders  of  the  Jew- 
ish people  began  to  profess  allegiance  to  the 
new  principle  of  faith  in  the  name  of  Christ 
which  the  Apostles  were  preaching  and  which 
was  manifested  with  great  power  in  the 
working  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  when  they 
believed  the  testimony  given  to  Him  as  the 
living  Christ  in  Whose  death  they  had  but 
lately  borne  a  part,  the  pleased  narrator 
tells  us  not  only  that  the  Word  of  God 
was  increasing  and  the  number  of  disciples 
multiplying  exceedingly,  but  also  that  even 
of  the  priests  a  great  multitude  were  giving 
submission  to  that  power  of  faith  which  was 
beginning  to  prevail.  When  St.  Paul  had 
boldness  to  say  at  the  end  of  his  career  that 
he  had  finished  his  fight  in  the  good  conflict 
into  which  he   had  been   sent   and  had  run 


M  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

the  goal  in  the  course  which  had  been 
marked  out  for  him,  he  dropped  the  meta- 
phor— as  was  his  wont — and  added  that  he 
could  be  sure  that  he  had  held  fast  and 
still  was  holding  fast  his  faithful  allegiance. 
We  do  not  hesitate  to  render  "  I  have  fin- 
ished my  course  ";  why  can  we  not  read  before 
this  phrase,  "  I  have  fought  my  good  fight," 
and  after  it,  "I  have  kept  my  faithfulness 
to  my  Lord  and  my  trust  in  Him  "?  What 
more  can  we  hope  to  mean,  we  whose  lips 
constantly  repeat  the  venerable  words  of  the 
Creed,  when  at  our  life's  close  we  respond 
to  them,  "All  this  I  stedfastly  believe"? 
And  St.  Jude's  solemn  and  almost  stern 
exhortation  that  we  should  fight  for  faith, 
for  faith  which  was  by  one  great  revelation 
and  act  of  grace  handed  over  to  those  who 
were  called  to  holiness  * — does  not  this  read 
a  solemn  and  deep-searching  lesson  of  duty 
when  we  refer  it  to  the  principle  of  our 
belief,  even  if  thence  we  pass  to  its  expres- 
sion? To  contend  for  our  belief,  for  our  right 
and  duty  to  believe,  for  that  principle  whence 
springs  our  life,  for  that  gift  which  belongs 

*ana^^*  all  at  once.' 


FAITH  25 

to  holiness  and  is  the  basis  of  holiness — to 
contend  in  this  sense  for  faith,  the  faith  which 
gives  and  strengthens  our  union  with  Christ, 
that  faith  in  Him  which  is  His  in  us — this 
is  no  easy  thing  to  require,  no  little  thing 
to  do.  But  to  lose  it,  so  St.  Jude's  argu- 
ment passes  on,  is  to  lose  godliness  and  to 
deny  the  Master.  And  thus  the  beginning 
of  this  Epistle  is  congruous  with  the  end, 
as  the  central  word  of  each  is  the  same: 
"  Ye,  beloved,  building  yourselves  up  on 
that  most  holy  faith  which  ye  have,  praying 
in  [the]  Holy  Spirit,  keep  yourselves  in 
God's  love,  waiting  for  the  mercy  of  our 
Lord  Jesus  Christ  unto  life  eternal."  *  It 
is  an  echo  of  the  Gospel :  "  Whoso  hath  faith 
in  the  Son  hath  life  eternal."  t 

IV 

The  New  Testament,  then,  dwells  on  faith 
as  a  grace  of  character  and  principle  of  life, 
of  action,  and  of  knowledge,  not  passing 
quite  over  into  the  meaning  which  is  sug- 
gested when  we  speak  of  our  confession  of 
belief  as  the  Faith  which  we  hold  and  main- 

♦  Jude  20,  21.  t  John  iii.  36. 


g6  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

tain.  This  fact  may  help  us  to  understand, 
in  regard  to  certain  aspects  of  Christian  be- 
lief and  their  expression  in  words  which  we 
propose  to  consider,  the  immense  impor- 
tance of  faith  and  of  its  right  use.  That  the 
soul  of  man  should  be  faithful  because  of 
its  personal  relation  with  God — a  relation 
which  is  perhaps  best  expressed  by  the  old 
word  '  affiance ' — that  it  should  have  that 
trust  in  God  revealed  in  His  Son  which 
brings  it  into  His  very  life,  that  man  should 
learn  truth  far  beyond  any  evidence  of  the 
senses  because  faith  makes  hope  real  and 
proves  the  invisible,  all  this  is  of  the  very 
essence  of  the  soul's  life  and  growth.  It 
cannot  be  fully  described,  because  it  cannot 
be  brought  within  limitations;  its  operation 
and  effect  cannot  be  told  in  words,  because 
they  are  spiritually  discerned.  From  this  it 
follows,  that  any  form  of  statement  in  re- 
gard to  matters  of  faith — whether  we  mean 
the  faculty  or  grace  or  the  truth  divinely 
made  known — must  be  inadequate  and  liable 
to  correction.  Our  soundest  knowledge,  to 
adapt  the  great  Hooker's  words,  is  that  we 
know    not    truth    as    indeed    it   is,    and    our 


FAITH  27 

safest  eloquence  concerning  it  is  our  silence. 
Yet  speak  we  must,  for  truth  must  be  con- 
fessed; and  think  we  must,  or  the  greatest 
gift  of  God  within  our  souls  will  perish. 

And  thus  the  Apostle  taught  in  the  Epistle 
in  which  he  was  exalting  the  power  of  faith: 
"  In  heart " — or  in  our  phrase,  in  soul — "  is 
men's  faith,  by  mouth  is  their  confession;  the 
former  brings  justification  (or  righteous- 
ness), the  later  brings  salvation  (or  perfec- 
tion)."* Selfishness  of  belief  is  selfishness 
of  truth;  as  he  who  learns  but  does  not  teach 
has  no  fruitful  knowledge,  so  he  who  believes 
but  makes  no  confession  of  his  belief  has 
not  a  living  faith.  It  is  not  enough  for  man 
to  find  how  he  may  be  just  before  God; 
he  must  reach  far  beyond  this  to  that  per- 
fection which  can  be  attained  only  in  holi- 
ness. Supreme  faith  is  supreme  truth;  and 
supreme  truth  must  be  both  known  and 
declared.  Therefore  it  is  not  amiss,  pass- 
ing beyond  the  classical  and  the  New  Testa- 
ment use  of  words,  to  call  that  which  we 
believe  our  *  belief '  and  the  object  of  our 
faith    our   '  faith ' ;   we   thus    assume    a    new 

*  Romans  x.  10. 


28  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

responsibility  for  definition  and  for  careful- 
ness of  thought.  We  do  indeed  feel  that 
there  is  a  sacredness  about  belief  in  a  per- 
son or  faith  in  a  truth,  which  will  not  allow 
us  to  apply  the  phrase  lightly  to  others  than 
God;  but  we  allow  ourselves,  and  we  can 
scarce  help  it,  as  was  just  said,  to  call  our 
confession  by  the  name  of  belief  and  our 
apprehension  of  truth  by  the  name  of  '  the 
faith.'  We  may  not  forget  the  source  whence 
we  derive  our  knowledge;  but  we  must 
certify  to  our  knowledge  and  certify  more- 
over that  we  have  tested  this  knowledge  by 
our  heaven-bestowed  power  of  reason.  Thus 
it  comes  to  pass  that  in  the  historic  Church 
of  Christ  we  have  not  only  fides  qua  creditur 
but  also  fides  cut  creditur,  not  only  faith  by 
which  we  believe  but  also  the  faith  which  we 
believe.  The  former  is  of  the  very  essence 
of  religion,  the  latter  is  necessary  for  its  ex- 
pression and  extension;  the  former  belongs 
to  its  revelation,  the  latter  is  called  forth  by 
its  history.  Of  the  former  I  have  spoken 
somewhat  to-day;  some  considerations  as  to 
the  latter  are  to  be  presented  later. 


FAITH  29 


V 


Let  me,  however,  add  one  consideration 
here,  as  connected  with  what  has  been  thus 
far  suggested  and  introductory  to  what  is 
to  follow.  The  objects  of  faith  do  not 
change;  they  are  all,  in  the  last  analysis, 
visions  of  the  unchanging  and  eternal  God. 
The  knowledge  which  comes  from  faith  does 
grow,  but  its  growth  is  in  scope  and  in 
exactness ;  the  form  of  thought,  of  expression, 
of  assent  must  change,  not  as  a  rule  easily 
nor  rapidly,  but  with  the  lapse  of  ages  and 
the  modifications  of  philosophical  thought, 
of  language,  of  the  boundaries  of  our  igno- 
rance. The  phraseology  of  the  fourth  cen- 
tury has  been  long  retained,  though  some- 
times not  without  adaptation  or  an  effort  at 
explanation;  but  those  who  decided  on  it 
did  not  consider  it  absolutely  final,  and  it  is 
possible  that  it  may  not  endure  for  as  many 
more  centuries  as  those  in  which  it  has  been 
so  well  used.  There  was  a  controversy  in 
our  Church  not  so  very  long  ago  over  certain 
words  spoken  as  by  authority:  "  Fixedness  of 
interpretation  is  of  the  essence  of  the  Creeds." 


30  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

Few  of  us  would  insist  on  that  form  of 
words  now.  But,  God  helping  us,  we  shall 
ever  affirm  that  fixity  of  truth  is  of  the 
essence  of  faith,  and  that  the  Christian  faith 
is  truly  held  and  taught  by  those  who  receive 
the  revelation  of  essential  verities  and  de- 
clare it  under  the  guidance  of  the  Spirit  as 
He  ever  leads  the  faithful  in  the  way  of 
truth.* 

*  John  xvi.  13;   the  reading  with   kv  and  the  dative  seems 
to  give  the  better  meaning. 


LECTURE  II 

FAITH  IN  GOD 

St.  Mark  xi.  22. 

'''Ex^Te  TTiGTiv  Qeov. 
"  Have  faith  in  God." 

In  the  former  lecture  we  undertook  to 
study  the  meaning  and  power  of  faith  as 
they  are  taught  in  the  New  Testament  and 
accepted  by  Christians.  We  found  that 
faith,  which  is  primarily  fidelity  and  then 
trust  or  affiance,  involves  a  personal  rela- 
tion to  one  whom  we  believe  and  in  whom 
we  believe,  and  that  it  is  thus  a  test  of 
character.  We  found  that  faith  is  also  a 
source  of  knowledge,  and  that  it  tells  us  of 
things  hoped  for,  unseen  and  eternal,  as  our 
senses  and  the  evidence  of  others  tell  us  of 
things  present,  seen  and  temporal.  We 
noted  that,  though  faith  baffles  full  definition, 
it  can  yet  find  expression  in  words;  and  that, 
though  the  use   of  the  term  is   almost  cer- 

31 


3a  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

tainly  later  than  New  Testament  times,  '  the 
Faith '  has  come  to  mean  a  recognized  ex- 
pression of  the  great  facts  which  faith  has 
brought  to  our  souls  and  our  hearts.  We 
glanced  at  the  relation  between  the  eternal 
truths  with  which  faith  has  chiefly  to  do 
and  their  necessarily  imperfect  expression; 
and  to-day  we  are  to  look  a  little  more 
definitely  at  faith  in  God  which  we  hold  and 
the  faith  in  God  which  finds  utterance  in 
our  confession  and  our  worship. 


Faith,  above  all  things  else,  is  distinctly  a 
personal  relation.  And  its  highest  act,  which 
is  also  its  most  essential  and  necessary  act, 
is  trust  in  God  and  fidelity  to  God.  If  its 
source  is  personal  and  its  object  is  personal, 
then  it  must  ultimately  rest  upon  Him  in 
Whom  personality  is  recognized  in  its  ful- 
ness, it  must  finally  reach  out  to  Him  in 
Whom  personality  is  completely  expressed. 
We  can  truly  say,  even  at  the  present  stage 
of  the  argument,  that  if  we  believe  at  all 
we  really  believe  God  and  believe  in  God, 
we  take  His  word  and  put  our  trust  in  Him. 


FAITH  IN  GOD  33 

Here,  at  any  rate,  we  can  make  the  distinc- 
tion, not  always  observed,  indeed,  in  language 
but  always  confessed  when  it  is  brought  to 
the  mind,  between  believing  a  person  and 
believing  in  a  person  {credere  alicui  and 
credere  in  aliquem),  both  being  distinguished 
from  believing  a  statement  as  to  a  person 
or  thing  {credere  aliquem,  aliquid,  esse).  A 
large  part  of  our  knowledge  comes  to  us 
from  our  belief  of  other  men's  knowledge  and 
honesty;  and  practically  we  have  no  more 
doubt  of  the  truth  of  that  to  which  they 
testify  than  we  have  of  the  truth  of  that  to 
which  our  own  senses  have  borne  witness. 
We  believe  many  men  whom  we  know  and 
many  whom  we  do  not  know,  without  in- 
curring the  charge  of  credulity  or  thoughtless 
assent;  yet  there  are  few  men  whom  we  have 
so  thoroughly  tried  or  whom  we  hold  in  such 
high  esteem  that  we  can  say  that  we  believe 
in  them.  God  is  indeed  the  only  person  in 
whom  we  can  really  believe,  the  only  one  on 
whom  faith  can  implicitly  rest  (fVz),  towards 
whom  faith  can  with  full  confidence  reach  out 
(ezV),  in  whom  faith  can  surely  dwell  (fV).^ 
We  believe,  we  say,  the  stability  of  nature's 


34  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

laws,  the  permanence  of  character,  the  ulti- 
mate victory  of  righteousness ;  *  but  this  is 
only  when  we  find  in  those  laws  the  unchang- 
ing will  of  God,  in  that  character  the  reflec- 
tion of  His  life,  in  that  victory  the  uncon- 
querable strength  of  His  truth.  And  indeed 
we  cannot  help  sajdng  to  ourselves  that  these 
things,  because  they  are  contingent,  may  con- 
ceivably change,  but  that  there  can  be  no 
possible  change  in  the  will,  the  life,  the  truth 
of  God.  If  we  seek  to  know  somewhat  of 
faith,  we  must  ask  as  to  our  faith  in  Him, 
as  He  is  a  person  and  as  we  are  brought 
into  personal  relations  with  Him. 

And  we  shall  do  well  to  remember,  as  we 
are  taught  in  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews, 
that  God  has  never  been  known  except  by 
faith,  and  that  worship  and  service  have 
never  been  rendered  to  Him  except  on  the 
basis  of  faith.  "In  it  the  men  of  older  time 
had  witness  borne  to  them,"  t  as  did  those 
of  later  days,  and  as  do  we.  Enoch  and 
Noah  and  Abraham,  "  in  the  dawn  of  his- 
tory's morning,"  had  no  more  immediate  or 

*  Westcott,  The  Historic  Faith,  I. 
■\  Hebrews  xi.  2. 


FAITH  IN  GOD  35 

more  easy  access  to  truth  and  to  the  source 
of  truth  than  is  given  to  our  lot  "  upon 
whom  the  ends  of  the  world  are  come  ";  nay 
rather,  they  were  filled  with  joy  at  the  pros- 
pect of  seeing  this  day,  the  Lord's  day  and 
ours,  the  day  of  nearer  approach  and  of 
clearer  vision.*  We  walk  in  the  steps  of  the 
father  of  the  faithful,  the  friend  of  God, 
with  humble  confidence;  but  our  faith  is  as 
direct  as  his,  while  his  was  a  type  or  shadow 
of  that  whereof  we  have  the  very  image.  By 
faith  the  fathers  knew  God,  and  by  faith  we 
know  Him ;  yet  they  received  not  the  promise, 
because  without  us  they  could  not  attain 
perfection. 

II 

We  cannot  tell  how  man  first  came  to  be- 
lieve that  God  is,  still  less  how  he  came  to 
have  faith  in  Him.  None  of  us,  I  venture 
to  say,  can  remember  how  the  knowledge  of 
God  first  came  to  his  soul  or  how  he  was  per- 
suaded that  in  God  he  might  or  should  put 
his  trust.  Doubtless,  most  of  us  would  say, 
a   father   or  mother  whose   every   word   we 

•  John  viii.  56. 


36  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

accepted  as  true  told  us  of  Him,  and  we 
believed  what  was  said.  Doubtless  some 
experience,  long  passed  from  memory,  turned 
this  confidence  in  a  parent  into  the  beginning 
of  faith  in  God.  Doubtless  our  prayers  and 
the  answers  to  them  quickened  our  faith,  and 
we  came  to  know  God,  as  we  came  to  know 
other  persons,  by  meeting  Him  and  speak- 
ing with  Him  and  feeling  His  influence  upon 
us.  Most  certainly  we  know  God  now  by 
a  real  knowledge  and  are  more  sure  of  Him 
than  we  are  of  any  other  person,  even  of 
ourselves. 

We  may  ask  ourselves,  as  we  come  to 
years  of  questioning  and  study,  how  if  we 
did  not  know  God  we  should  be  led  to  the 
conviction  that  He  is;  or  if  we  are  forced  to 
search  for  a  reason  for  the  faith  which  we 
have  once  had,  we  may  inquire  as  to  its 
foundation  and  the  manner  of  rebuilding 
upon  it;  or  we  may  consider  how  we  should 
deal  with  a  man  who  might  tell  us  intelli- 
gently and  honestly  that  he  was  in  doubt 
whether  there  is  a  God  or  no.  And  the  argu- 
ment, as  we  should  use  it  with  ourselves  or 
with  others,  is  a  strong  one.     The  physical 


FAITH  IN  GOD  37 

world  in  which  we  live,  and  with  the  phe- 
nomena of  which  we  are  perforce  acquainted, 
is  a  world  of  order  and  of  power,  of  use- 
fulness and  of  beauty;  the  moral  world  in 
which  we  find  ourselves,  and  in  which  we  are 
brought  into  contact  with  other  moral  beings, 
is  one  which  educates  character  and  trains 
affection  and  will,  conscience  and  reason;  on 
the  whole,  our  world  is  administered  in  the 
interests  of  happiness  and  of  virtue;  and 
most  of  us  find  that  it  bears  evidence  of  being 
a  world  in  which  moral  beings  like  ourselves 
are  or  may  be  prepared  for  a  life  more 
extended  than  here  falls  to  our  lot.  All 
this  might  practically  lead  us  to  believe  that 
there  is  an  intelligent  Creator  with  a  pur- 
poseful and  benevolent  will,  Who  is  also  a 
moral  governor,  and  Who  stands  in  vital 
relations  to  all  that  He  has  made  and 
especially  to  the  rational  agents  to  whom 
He  gives  so  much  happiness  and  power  and 
responsibility.  And,  as  I  was  saying,  we 
press  this  argument  from  design  or  from 
moral  government  upon  ourselves  when 
doubts  arise  in  our  minds,  or  upon  others 
when   for  their  own  sake   or  for   ours   they 


38  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

ask    us    a    reason    for    the    hope    that    is 
in  us. 

But  however  confidently  we  use  this  line 
of  thought  or  of  speech,  we  do  not  for  a 
moment  think  that  we  are  creating  in  the 
mind  or  the  soul  the  thought  of  God,  or — to 
speak  more  accurately — that  we  are  intro- 
ducing it  into  the  mind  or  the  soul.  We 
cannot  create  it,  we  cannot  even  introduce 
it,  any  more  than  we  can  create  the  seeing 
eye,  or  can  impart  to  an  eye  as  yet  sightless 
the  power  of  vision.  We  teach  the  child  to 
use  his  eyes,  to  interpret  what  they  report, 
to  protect  them  from  harm,  to  seek  relief 
in  case  they  receive  an  injury;  but  the  eye 
is  part  of  an  organism  which  lives  and  grows, 
and  in  the  last  physical  analysis  it  is  the 
light  already  existing  without  the  eye  which 
has  developed  it  and  made  it  to  be  what 
it  is.  And  in  like  manner,  the  soul  of  man 
by  faith  knows  God  because  God  is ;  and  God 
has  made  the  soul  of  man  with  an  initial  and 
growing  aptitude  to  know  Him,  and  has 
given  it  the  power  of  faith  as  He  has  given 
the  eye  the  power  of  vision,  that  it  may  see 
Him  and  in  Him  may  come  to  the  knowl- 


FAITH  IN  GOD  39 

edge  of  truth  and  righteousness  and  holiness. 
We  cannot  explain;  we  can  but  state  the 
facts  of  observation  and  experience;  and  we 
find  that  they  have  been  and  are  the  same 
in  kind,  though  far  differing  in  degree,  in 
all  the  ages  and  among  all  mankind.  In 
quiet  ways  faith  is,  as  we  may  say,  trans- 
mitted with  other  intellectual  and  spiritual 
powers,  attracting  little  attention  because  it 
is  so  natural  and  does  its  work  so  silently; 
while  again  with  mighty  power  it  shows  its 
stored-up  energy  and  works  in  heroes  the 
miracles  which  adorn  the  history  of  the  great 
company  of  faithful  people.  We  know  that 
it  worked  in  men  before  Abraham  made  his 
confession  of  God,  and  gained  titles  God- 
ward  and  man-ward — Friend  of  God,  Father 
of  believers — which  make  him  honored  in  the 
history  of  the  world;  we  know  that  it  was  not 
Moses  alone  who  endured  as  seeing  the  in- 
visible One;  we  know  that  in  the  annals  of 
the  Christian  Church,  as  in  those  of  the 
earlier  dispensations,  we  may  read  over  and 
over  again  the  victories  of  faith;  we  know 
that  those  annals,  rightly  read,  tell  of  what 
men    have    patiently    suffered    and    bravely 


40  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

undertaken  because  they  had  faith  in  the 
living  God.  But  how  that  faith  came,  save 
that  it  was  the  gift  of  God  Himself,  we  can- 
not tell. 

The  great  revelation  of  faith,  the  great 
truth  which  it  taught  to  men  of  old  and 
teaches  in  more  profound  meaning  to  us,  is 
that  God  is  One.  There  is,  as  we  have  seen, 
no  real  faith  except  in  a  Divine  person;  there 
is  no  true  faith  except  in  the  One  God. 
Legendary  stories  tell  us  how  the  great 
patriarch,  inheriting  the  acknowledgment  of 
gods  many  and  lords  many,  the  son  (it  is 
said)  of  an  idol-maker,  came  to  the  con- 
fession of  one  only  God  as  he  studied  the 
starry  heavens  and  saw  the  workings  of 
providence  and  searched  the  spirit  that  was 
in  him.  And  because  he  believed  in  the 
one  God  thus  revealed,  because  he  was 
the  great  monotheist  of  that  early  time,  the 
power  of  his  faith  has  been  a  mighty  inspira- 
tion; it  was  entrusted  to  his  descendants 
along  chosen  lines;  and  kept  by  them,  though 
often  hardly  kept,  it  is  religiously  the  great 
legacy  of  the  Old  Covenant  to  the  New. 

At  the  very  head  of  the  Law  which  was 


FAITH  IN  GOD  41 

given  to  the  chosen  people  as  they  were  be- 
coming a  theocratic  nation  is  the  declara- 
tion: "He  who  is  our  God  is  one";*  and 
this  is  a  truth  which  can  never  be  abrogated, 
which  can  never  cease  to  hold  its  power. 
It  is  no  easy  truth  to  believe,  no  easy  truth 
to  understand;  the  mind  of  nearly  the  whole 
gentile  world,  the  world  outside  of  the  special 
covenant,  was  so  set  against  it  that  we 
wonder  when  we  find  a  philosopher  or  a 
poet  with  the  power  of  a  seer  acknowledging 
and  teaching  the  unity  of  God;  and  there 
is  scarce  a  page  of  the  history  of  the  Jewish 
people  under  judges  and  kings  on  which  we 
do  not  read  of  the  polytheistic  idolatry  into 
which  they  persistently  fell  and  from  which 
they  were  delivered  only  at  the  cost  of  the 
great  captivity.  We  might  almost  say,  if 
we  dared,  that  the  thought  of  the  unity  of 
God  is  not  connatural  with  man's  belief  in 
the  divine,  as  revealed  by  creation  and  provi- 
dence and  moral  government;  but  we  declare, 
and  we  must  declare,  that  the  great  affirma- 
tion of  faith  is  that  God  is  One,  the  great 

*  Deuteronomy  vi.  4;  translate:  "Jahveh  is  our  God;  Jahveh 
is  One;  "  cf.  Exodus  vi.  2,  3. 


4a  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

demand  of  faith  is  that  God  be  worshipped, 
yes  and  loved,  as  One.  "Hear,  O  Israel: 
our  God  is  One;  and  thou  shalt  love  Him." 
Hence  comes  every  great  "  categorical  im- 
perative " ;  hence  comes  the  irresistible  power 
of  a  true  faith.  This  truth,  because  it  is 
the  greatest  of  all  truths,  is  difficult  beyond 
others;  and  its  difficulty,  which  springs  from 
its  greatness,  has  led  to  serious  misappre- 
hensions and  denials  which  mar  the  history 
of  its  revelation;  we  may  well  question 
whether  it  could  have  been  rightly  under- 
stood at  the  first. 

Ill 

However  the  religious  leaders  may  have 
grasped  its  full  meaning,  we  can  hardly 
doubt  that  the  doctrine  of  one  God  meant 
to  the  Jewish  people  for  a  long  time  that 
they  as  a  nation  had  but  one  God,  or  per- 
haps that  they  had  but  one  supreme  God; 
and  they  were  ready  to  confess  that  any 
other  nation  might  have  another  god  as 
its  only  or  supreme  divinity.  ''  Cujus  regio, 
ejus    religio ''    was    more    seriously    believed 


FAITH  IN  GOD  43 

in  those  ancient  days  than  in  the  more  recent 
times  when  the  proverb  was  made  current. 
The  king  of  Judah  who  submitted  himself 
to  the  king  of  Syria  felt  that  he  must  set 
up  an  altar  in  the  temple  at  Jerusalem  to 
the  chief  god  of  Syria ;  *  and  the  emigrants 
brought  from  the  East  to  the  land  of  Israel 
complained  that  they  suffered  from  lions  be- 
cause they  knew  not  the  manner  of  wor- 
shipping the  god  of  the  country  to  which 
they  had  been  removed.t  Thus  at  times  the 
monotheism  of  the  Jewish  people,  when  it 
was  kept  from  degenerating  into  polytheism, 
did  not  advance  beyond  what  we  call  heno- 
theism  or  monolatry,  which  practically  denies 
that  there  is  and  can  be  but  one  living  and 
true  God. 

But  apart  from  this  error,  on  which  we 
do  not  need  now  to  dwell,  the  Hebrews 
long  failed  to  understand  that  by  the  Unity 
— or  rather  the  Oneness — of  God  is  meant 
much  more  than  is  implied  by  a  declaration 
that  there  is  but  one  God.  It  is  true  that 
the  faithful  Jew  or  Christian  does   worship 

*  II.  Kings  xvi.  10  ff. ;  cf .  II.  Chronicles  xxv.  14. 
t  II.  Kings  xvii.  25  flF. 


44  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

one  God,  not  two  or  three,  not  a  hundred 
or  a  thousand;  our  faith  would  not  tolerate 
polytheism,  and  our  reason  would  not  allow 
us  to  recognize  equal  or  practically  equal 
gods.  But  our  faith  goes  beyond  this,  in 
declaring  that  our  God,  the  God  of  our  faith, 
is  One,  not  alone  or  chiefly  numerically,  but 
integrally.  If  words  will  serve  to  express 
the  thought,  one-ness  is  an  essential  attribute 
of  His  being;  He  has  in  Him  all  that  belongs 
to  the  highest  conception  of  completeness, 
of  a  unity  complete  in  itself,  indivisible  and 
incommunicable.  The  unity  of  God  is  there- 
fore a  different  thing  from  the  unity  of  any 
other  being,  a  stone,  a  plant,  an  animal,  a 
man,  though  the  higher  we  go  in  the  scale 
the  nearer  we  approach  to  the  unity  of  God. 
Man  has  the  unity  of  a  person  made  com- 
plete by  his  relationship  to  other  persons; 
God  has  the  supreme  unity  which  is  not  in- 
deed without  relationships,  but  which  has 
those  relationships  within  Himself.  How 
near  the  faith  of  the  Abrahamic  behever  was 
to  attaining  this  truth  we  do  not  know;  but 
in  the  days  of  psalmists  and  prophets  it 
began  to  be  apprehended.     We  feel  certain 


FAITH  IN  GOD  45 

that  the  later  writers  of  the  Old  Testament 
did  not  hold  to  the  oneness  of  God  as  do 
the  modern  Jews  and  the  Mohammedans; 
the  being  with  whom  they  stood  in  such  close 
relations,  whom  they  worshipped,  and  from 
whom  they  expected  so  much,  was  a  one-ly 
God  but  not  a  lonely  God;  He  was  not  like 
the  deity  of  the  Stoics,  fate-controlled,  or 
like  the  deities  of  the  Epicureans,  happy  be- 
cause indifferent  to  man's  joys  or  sorrows; 
such  weak  conceptions  were  far  from  those 
who  sang  the  praises  of  the  God  of  Israel 
and  lived  by  His  hfe  and  for  Him.*  The 
real  unity  of  God,  the  unity  which  appeals 
to  faith  and  satisfies  reason,  demands  ulti- 
mately that  faith  in  God  which  the  Christian 
Church  professes. 

Now,  this  begins  to  appear  in  the  Old 
Testament  and  in  other  pre-Christian  writ- 
ings, as  indeed  its  clearer  statement  appears 
for  the  more  part  in  the  New  Testament, 
in  a  devotional  or  religious  rather  than  a 
didactic  or  doctrinal  form.  The  poet  and 
seer  found  that  his  faith  in  God,  the  Creator 
and  Governor  of  the  world  and  of  men,  led 

*  See  Medd,  The  One  Mediator,  Lecture  I. 


46  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

him  to  faith  in  the  Wisdom  or  Word — he 
came  very  near  saying  the  Son — of  God. 
As  he  meditated  on  the  meaning  of  creation, 
one  poet  made  Wisdom  speak  in  words 
which  seem  to  belong  to  St.  Paul  in  his 
later  Epistles,  claiming  a  place  as  counsellor 
and  equal  of  the  Most  High,  planning  His 
great  designs  before  the  world  and  carrying 
them  out  when  the  worlds  were  made.*  In 
the  Psalms  we  read  of  the  Word  (or  a 
word)  of  God  whereby  the  heavens  were 
made;t  and  though  this  is  parallel  to  the 
phrase  in  the  eleventh  chapter  of  the  Epistle 
to  the  Hebrews,  "  By  faith  we  understand 
that  the  ages  were  framed  by  an  utterance 
of  God,"  t  and  need  not  imply  a  second  per- 
son in  the  Godhead,  yet  it  almost  certainly 
led  to  that  "  very  old  teaching  of  the  syna- 
gogue "  in  regard  to  a  mediating  Word,§ 
which  declared  the  counsel  and  might  of  the 
One  God  of  Israel  to  be  effective  through 
His  Word  or  Wisdom. 

And  still  more  often  and  more  distinctly 
do  we  read  of  the  Spirit  or  Breath  or  Life 

•  Proverbs  viii.  22  ff.  f  Psalm  xxxiii.  6:    '^2'^, 

X  PWarL,  not  "kdytft.  §  KIQ^D. 


FAITH  IN  GOD  47 

of  the  Almighty  as  sharing  the  attributes  of 
His  divinity.  Not  always,  indeed,  in  words 
which  must  be  thus  applied,  but  constantly 
in  such  a  way  as  to  suggest  it,  as  far  back 
as  the  days  of  David  in  an  utterance  which 
is  acknowledged  by  all  to  be  his,  and  as 
late  as  the  time  of  the  Second  Isaiah,  do  we 
find  such  words  as  these:  "The  Spirit  of 
God  spake  by  me,  and  His  Word  was  on 
my  tongue";  "The  Lord  God  and  His 
Spirit  hath  sent  me."  Men  had  come  to  a 
belief  in  God's  Spirit  in  a  devotional,  poetical, 
prophetic  way,  even  more  distinctly  than  they 
had  come  to  believe  in  His  Word;  and  in 
fact  the  operation  of  the  living  power  of 
God  was  more  clearly  manifest  than  that  of 
His  reason.  Thus,  even  before  the  closing 
of  the  canon  of  the  Old  Testament,  the  mind 
of  the  pious  Jew  had  moved  towards  faith 
in  the  Word  of  the  one  eternal  God  and  in 
His  Spirit.  And  the  sapiental  and  meditative 
writings  of  the  period  between  the  Old  Testa- 
ment and  the  New  show  that  this  faith  was 
quickened  then  and  that  it  found  still  more 
clear  expression.  The  thought  of  a  King 
Messiah  gave  way  to  the  expectation   of  a 


48  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

divine  pre-existent  Mediator,  the  first-born 
of  God,  the  heavenly  Man,  the  eternal 
Word,  the  Memra;  and  with  Him  was  ex- 
pected the  coming  of  the  Holy  Spirit, 
restoring  the  gift  of  prophecy  which 
had  failed  since  Malachi,  God's  voice  in 
Man.* 

Thus  the  mind  of  devout  men  in  Israel,  of 
those  who  were  looking  for  redemption  and 
expecting  the  fulfilment  of  the  promises,  had 
passed  far  beyond  the  rigid  monotheism 
which  had  seemed  to  mark  the  teaching  and 
the  belief  of  the  earlier  days.  Faith,  holding 
to  its  personal  relation  to  the  God  of  the 
fathers,  had  come  to  know  Him  more  fully 
than  the  fathers  had  known  Him;  faith, 
accepted  as  a  source  of  the  highest  knowl- 
edge, had  gained  an  apprehension  of  the 
manner  of  the  life  of  the  living  and  true 
God.  Thus  it  was  that,  when  the  approach 
of  the  Gospel  was  announced,  its  herald 
could  proclaim  a  revelation  of  the  Spirit  of 
God  made  by  His  Son  in  Whom  He  was  well 

*  See  especially  the  opening  section  of  the  article  on  the 
Trinity  in  the  additional  (fifth)  volume,  p.  308,  of  Hastings's 
Dictionary  of  the  Bible,  by  Professor  Hugh  M.  Scott. 


FAITH  IN  GOD  49 

pleased.  The  first  two  chapters  of  St.  Luke's 
Gospel  bear  the  strongest  evidence  that  they 
reproduce  the  thoughts,  the  experience,  and 
the  very  v^ords  of  those  v^ho  had  to  do  with 
the  ushering-in  of  the  new  covenant.  The 
phraseology  is  that  of  the  older  covenant — 
both  narrative  and  hymns  must  have  been 
told  and  sung  originally  in  Hebrew;  yet  the 
great  revelation,  wonderful  though  it  was, 
found  the  minds  as  well  as  the  words  of 
men  prepared  for  it.  "  Thy  child  shall  be 
great,  and  shall  be  called  the  Son  of  the 
Highest " ;  "  The  Holy  Spirit  shall  come 
upon  thee,  and  that  which  shall  be  born  shall 
be  called  holy,  the  Son  of  God  " ;  "  Blessed 
be  the  Lord  God  of  Israel,  for  He  hath 
visited  and  made  redemption  for  His  peo- 
ple"; "Unto  you  is  born  a  Saviour  who  is 
Christ  the  Lord " — "  a  victorious  Leader, 
the  Lord  anointed,  Jahveh  Messiah."  *  The 
record  of  the  Baptism  is  not,  we  may  well 
think,  as  old  as  the  event  itself;  but  we  find 
no  anachronism  when  we  read  that  at  that 
early  day  there  was  the  proclamation  of  the 
Son  of  God  and  the  open  manifestation  of 

*Luke  i.  32,  35,  68;  ii.  11. 


50  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

His  Spirit;*  for  some  of  those  who  wit- 
nessed this  great  act  of  consecration  were 
well  prepared  for  both,  as  they  had  come 
to  faith  in  the  Son  and  the  Spirit  of  the 
eternal  Father.  The  use  of  the  words  or 
names  by  the  writers  of  the  earlier  Gospels 
seemed  to  awaken  no  surprise  and  to  call  for 
no  explanation;  Christ  could  speak  of  His 
marvellous  works  as  done  by  the  Spirit  of 
God,  and  could  declare — evidently  speaking 
of  Himself,  though  privately  indeed  to  His 
disciples — that  the  Father  could  be  known 
by  none  save  the  Son  and  he  to  whom  the 
Son  should  reveal  Him.t  St.  John,  writing 
at  a  later  time  and  perhaps  rather  inter- 
preting than  reproducing  what  Christ  had 
said,  tells  us  how  He  called  Himself  the  Son 
of  God,  how  He  even  declared  that  as  a  gift 
from  the  Father  He  possessed  the  divine 
attribute  of  having  life  in  Himself,  and  how 
He  gave  the  promise  of  the  Spirit  who  was 
His  Spirit  because  the  Father's ;  t  all  was 
leading  up  to  the  revelation  which  was  re- 
served to  the  close  of  the   Gospel  that   the 

*  Luke  iii.  21,  22.  t  Matthew  xi.  27. 

t  John  X.  36,  V.  26,  xv.  26,  xvi.  25. 


FAITH  IN  GOD  61 

name  of  God  is  the  Father  and  the  Son  and 
the  Holy  Spirit.* 

We  may  also  note  how  soon  and  how 
naturally  the  Evangelists  began  to  call  Christ 
by  a  name  which  to  them  as  Hebrews  writ- 
ing in  Greek  was  a  very  sacred  name  and 
represented  the  ineffable  tetragrammaton  of 
the  older  Scriptures,  the  name  which  we  con- 
tinue in  constant  and  reverent  use  though 
it  does  not  always  recall  to  us  the  name 
of  Jahveh — '  the  Lord.'  It  was  the  Lord 
Who  appointed  the  seventy,  the  Lord  Who 
rose  from  the  dead  and  appeared  to  His 
Apostles,  the  Lord  Whom  the  beloved  dis- 
ciple recognized  on  the  shore  of  the  lake 
after  the  resurrection.!  How  naturally  and 
how  constantly  Christ  Jesus  bears  the  name 
in  the  Epistles  needs  but  to  be  suggested 
here.  His  place,  His  first  disciples  saw,  was 
with  the  Almighty  Father;  in  some  way  He 
was  the  Lord  of  Whom  the  historians  and 
prophets  and  poets  of  Israel  had  spoken. 
Their  faith  was,  therefore,  in  Father  and 
Son  and  Holy  Ghost  before  they  had  framed 

*  Matthew  xxviii.  19. 

f  Luke  X.  1,  xxiv.  34;  John  xxi.  17. 


Sa  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

or  were  ready  to  frame  any  creed  which 
should  confess  three  persons  in  the  Godhead 
or  even  the  threefold  Name.  Because  they 
believed  in  God,  they  believed  in  His  Son; 
because  they  believed  in  the  Father  and 
the  Son,  they  believed  in  the  Spirit;  and 
that,  as  far  as  we  can  see,  simply  as  an  act 
of  faith  and  with  no  thought  of  expressing 
in  a  formula  their  faith  of  trust  and  devotion 
of  insight.  Faith  preceded  what  we  should 
call  the  Faith. 


IV 

Thus  this  wonderful  faith,  inspired  by  a 
life  and  working  out  in  life,  was  almost  if 
not  quite  apart  from  any  clear  thought  or 
questionings  as  to  the  Incarnation  or  any 
suggestion  of  that  which  we  try  to  express 
when  we  speak  of  the  three  Persons  in  the 
eternal  Godhead.  It  grew  up  (as  we  may  say) 
naturally,  as  devout  men  came  to  learn  more 
and  more  about  God,  to  think  of  all  His 
works  and  to  have  their  talking  of  His 
doings,  and  to  honor  Him  better.  It  was 
really  the  result  of  an  intuition  based  on  a 


FAITH  IN  GOD  63 

personal  relationship;  it  was  truth  presented 
to  the  soul  through  faith  and  apprehended 
by  willing  obedience  to  the  ancient  law, 
"  Thou  shalt  love  the  Lord  thy  God  with 
all  thy  heart  and  with  all  thy  soul  and  with 
all  thy  mind  " ;  it  came  from  an  insight  the 
operation  of  which  could  not  have  been  dis- 
cerned by  thought  and  the  result  of  which 
could  not  have  been  satisfactorily  expressed 
in  words.  For  faith  is  always  inspired  by  a 
reality,  and  there  can  be  no  faith  except  in 
a  living  person.  And  the  Hebrew  was  even 
from  early  times  taught  to  see,  in  the  close 
relation  in  which  the  God  of  the  covenant 
stood  to  himself,  that  he  himself  had  been 
made  in  the  image  of  God;  and  his  assurance 
of  the  One-ness,  the  Unity,  of  God  was  not 
weakened,  but  rather  increased,  by  the  theo- 
phanies  in  which,  under  the  likeness  of  some 
human  or  celestial  visitant,  Jahveh,  the  Lord, 
made  Himself  known  to  him.  The  messenger 
Jahveh,  "  the  angel  Lord,"  *  was  the  eternal 
One  making  Himself  known;  and  as  His 
words  and  His  acts  were  those  of  the  Most 

•First  mentioned  in  Genesis  xvi.  7;  'the  angel  of  God'  in 
Genesis  xxi.  17. 


64  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

High,  so  as  Most  High  He  accepted  homage. 
He  was  the  Word  speaking,  the  reason  in- 
terpreting, a  wondrous  revelation  or  unveil- 
ing of  the  real  life  of  the  God  of  Israel. 

So  was  it  also,  and  we  are  inclined  to  say, 
more  readily,  with  belief  in  the  Spirit  of  the 
Lord.  Some  personal  power,  some  breath 
of  life,  came  to  men  whose  hearts  and  souls 
were  prepared,  and  thoughts  were  conceived 
and  expressed  which  witnessed  to  a  true  in- 
spiration. If  in  the  Old  Testament  we  are 
constantly  reminded  of  limited  power  of 
vision  and  limited  capacity  for  knowledge 
and  limited  gifts  of  utterance,  yet  over  and 
over  again  we  witness  acts  or  listen  to  utter- 
ances which  seem  to  belong  to  a  later  day 
and  a  clearer  revelation.  A  psalmist  sings 
as  any  godly  man  might  sing  in  any  age,  and 
suddenly  something  guides  his  tongue  to  a 
special  acknowledgment  of  a  gift  and  a  glory 
which  had  not  been  as  yet  revealed.  A 
prophet  proclaims  for  his  o\^ti  time  the 
significance  of  events  or  of  tendencies  with 
the  declaration  of  God's  reward  of  blessing 
or  of  judgment,  and  presently  he  sees  past 
all  that  is  immediately  involved  in  the  les- 


FAITH  IN  GOD  55 

son  to  which  he  has  begun  to  give  utterance, 
and  tells  of  eternal  issues,  testifying  before- 
hand to  the  suffering  of  God's  righteous 
servant  and  the  glory  that  shall  follow.* 
Before  Christ  came,  faith  had  seen  and  had 
given  utterance  to  this  great  truth,  that  in 
the  Godhead  there  is  fulness  of  life,  that  the 
Word  and  the  Spirit  of  God  are  truly  and 
essentially  divine. 

I  suggested,  a  moment  ago,  that  it  might 
seem  to  us  a  more  ready  thing  to  learn  of 
God's  Spirit  than  of  His  Word,  and  that  we 
might  expect  the  distinct  revelation  of  life 
to  precede  that  of  truth.  That  it  was  not 
so  in  the  earlier  days  seems  evident  from  the 
writings  of  historians  and  prophets;  and  we 
may  say  that  the  Hebrew  mind  was  so 
moulded  that  it  must  have  the  more  con- 
crete knowledge  of  God  Who  lived  among 
men  before  it  could  reach  to  the  knowledge 
of  God  Who  lives  in  men.  A  little  reflection 
will,  I  think,  convince  us  that  it  was  really 
so  when  the  great  Christian  revelation  was 
made  in  Jesus  Christ  and  that  it  is  really 
so  to-day.     The  Word  must  tabernacle  in  us 

*  I.  Peter  i.  10. 


56  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

first,  that  the  Spirit  may  lead  us  into  truth; 
the  theology  of  the  Son  can  be  discerned  and 
expressed,  as  was  done  centuries  ago,  while 
we  must  wait  for  the  theology  of  the  Holy 
Spirit  perhaps  until  a  new  dispensation  shall 
come.  Fully  to  consider  this,  however,  is 
beyond  the  limit  of  this  argument,  if  not  of 
our  whole  discussion.* 

But  we  may  well  remind  ourselves  that 
faith,  which  carried  on  the  love  and  the 
hope  of  godly  men  of  old,  the  full  efficacy 
of  which  in  its  pre-Christian  power  is  seen 
in  the  loftiest  strain  of  Hebrew  prophecy 
and  poetry,  is  pure  faith.  It  does  not  differ 
at  all  in  principle  from  that  by  which  we 
trust  and  believe;  by  means  of  the  same  faith 
in  which  we  look  to  find  salvation — we  may 
again  remind  ourselves  from  the  words  of 
the  Christian  prophet — the  elders,  men  of 
the  ancient  covenant,  had  full  witness  borne 
to  them.  Faith  was  the  constant  habit  of 
their  thought,  faith  the  power  of  their  life, 
faith  the  source  for  them  of  a  knowledge 
which  they  could  scarce  begin  to  express  in 
words.    They  thought,  they  lived,  they  knew, 

*  But  see  Lecture  IV.  and  the  end  of  Professor  Scott's  article. 


FAITH  IN  GOD  67 

by  virtue  of  that  which  they  had  learned 
from  without  themselves,  but  they  were 
carried  on  beyond  it  all  by  that  personal 
relation  to  God  which  in  its  results  is  ex- 
ceeding abundant  above  all  that  we  can  ask 
or  think  or  even  know.  Their  faith  taught 
them  more  than  they  would  have  confessed, 
could  they  have  thought  in  our  terms,  to  be 
for  them  the  Faith. 


Our  Creed,  and  indeed  every  declaration 
of  the  Catholic  faith,  contains  statements 
which  the  Church  deems  essential,  but  of 
various  kinds.  Some  we  recognize  as  facts 
of  natural  religion,  as  that  God  is  and  that 
He  judges  in  righteousness;  some,  as  facts 
of  history,  as  that  Jesus  Christ  was  crucified 
and  rose  again  from  the  dead;  some,  as  con- 
fession of  personal  experience,  as  that  Christ 
is  our  Lord  and  that  we  may  obtain  forgive- 
ness of  sins;  some  we  may  call  inferences 
of  thought,  as  that  God  is  the  Creator; 
some  have  become  for  us  an  assurance  for 
the  future,  as  that  there  shall  be  a  life 
eternal;   and   for   some    we   fall    back    upon 


58  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

what  we  call  faith  and  faith  alone,  as  that 
Jesus  Christ  is  the  Son  of  God,  and  is  now 
enthroned  in  glory.  But  however  we  may 
for  one  reason  or  another  classify  them,  they 
all  enter  into  the  articles  of  our  belief,  our 
statement  of  the  Faith;  however  else  we  have 
gained  a  knowledge  of  them,  such  they  have 
become  for  us  as  we  have  apprehended  their 
full  significance.  Each  article,  evident  as  it 
may  seem  if  stated  historically,  profound  as 
it  may  seem  if  expressed  in  theological  terms, 
is  for  us  matter  of  faith;  and  matter  of  faith 
each  was  originally,  or  must  necessarily  have 
become,  before  it  could  be  placed  with  others 
in  such  a  statement  of  essentials. 

We  have  yet  to  consider  how  the  Church 
came  to  certain  definitive  statements  of  her 
corporate  belief;  it  is  perhaps  enough  for 
us  to-day  if  we  have  found  one  chief  reason 
for  the  Christian  acceptance  of  the  Son  and 
the  Spirit  as  one  with  the  Father  in  His 
eternal  Godhead  and  its  glory;  that  it  was, 
in  effect,  in  the  simple  faith  of  those  who 
knew  and  loved  and  trusted  in  the  God  of 
the  ancient  covenant,  and  to  whom  there- 
fore  He   unveiled   somewhat    of   the    deeper 


FAITH  IN  GOD  59 

truth  of  His  nature  and  His  life.  They 
knew  that  their  God  was  the  living  and  true 
God,  eternal,  of  infinite  power,  wisdom,  and 
goodness,  the  maker  and  preserver  of  all 
things.  If  there  are  in  the  unity  of  this 
Godhead,  as  necessary  to  the  fulness  of  life 
and  of  attributes,  a  Word  and  a  Life,  real 
existences  and  really  to  be  manifested,  those 
holy  and  humble  men  of  heart  must  have 
seen  somewhat  of  it;  if,  to  reverse  the  argu- 
ment, such  men  in  their  friendship  with  God 
saw  these  suggestions  of  what  we  call  the 
doctrine  of  the  Holy  Trinity,  it  must  be 
that  there  is  a  real  foundation  for  that  doc- 
trine. It  is  involved,  as  the  greatest  of 
Christian  theologians  have  told  us,  in  the 
necessary  assertion  that  the  God  Whom  man 
can  rightly  worship,  is  and  must  be  living  and 
true.*  Thus  did  this  truth,  not  yet  formally 
stated  and  recognized,  come  to  the  souls 
of  those  who  knew  the  God  of  their  fathers 
to  be  their  God  for  ever  and  ever;  thus  did 
their  faith  and  worship  prepare  the  way  for 
the  acceptance  of  the  Son  of  God  when  He 
came  incarnate  into  the  world,  and  for  the 

*  a?[,Ti6iv6g,  *  real,'  *  very.' 


60  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

profound   meditations   and   teachings   of   the 
doctors  of  the  Church  of  Christ. 

Only — and  this  shall  be  said  for  what  is 
to  follow  as  well  as  for  that  to  which  our 
thoughts  have  been  now  directed — we  must 
remember  that  the  Faith  does  not  precede 
faith;  for  in  fact,  and  of  very  necessity,  faith 
is  requisite  in  its  life  and  growth  before  aught 
can  be  declared  as  a  part  of  the  faith  of  the 
believer.  Our  Gloria  may  depend  for  form 
of  words  upon  the  agreement  of  doctors  and 
the  decrees  of  councils;  but  the  faith  in  which 
we  worship  goes  back  to  our  knowledge  of 
God  as  He  has  made  Himself  known  and  to 
the  first  and  great  commandment.  It  is 
conceivable  that  human  terms  may  cease  to 
express  great  truths;  it  is  impossible  that 
which  is  absolutely  true,  faith  in  God,  should 
lose  its  verity  or  its  power.  This  can,  I  think, 
be  made  to  appear  still  more  clearly  when 
we  come  to  inquire  as  to  our  faith  in  Jesus 
Christ  as  the  incarnate  Son  of  God. 


LECTURE  III 
FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST 

Acts  xvi.  31. 

Jliarevaov  eirl  tov  Kvpiov  'Irjaovv. 
**  Become  a  believer  upon  the  Lord  Jesus." 

We  have  noted  in  the  lectures  which  have 
preceded  that  faith  is  a  source  of  knowledge 
and  that  facts  of  the  highest  importance  are 
brought  before  our  minds  by  this  proof  of 
things  invisible.  We  have  noted  also  that 
the  facts  thus  learned  become  of  necessity 
the  objects  of  our  thoughts  and  require  to 
be  stated  in  words.  These  words  may  be 
very  simple  indications  of  our  thoughts  and 
suggestions  of  our  faith;  or  they  may  be  the 
carefully  weighed  words  in  which  we  try  to 
express  technically  the  truths  which  we  have 
been  led  to  believe.  But  we  should  err  if 
we  were  to  claim  that  the  technical  terms 
are  necessary  either  for  our  conviction  as  to 

61 


62  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

important  truth  or  even  for  our  sufficient 
declaration  of  that  conviction.  The  Hebrews 
in  their  approach  to  the  truth  of  the  three- 
fold being  of  God,  the  early  Christians  in 
their  clear  acceptance  of  that  truth,  did  not 
need  to  speak  of  three  Persons  in  the  God- 
head or  of  God  as  existing  in  Trinity;  and 
neither  of  these  terms  has  passed  into  the 
Creed.  They  serve  as  symbols  to  suggest 
and  certify  the  great  and  important  truths 
to  which  they  apply;  and  their  value,  like 
that  of  other  symbols,  is  largely  that  they 
are  technical  rather  than  devotional,  and  that 
students  of  divine  truth  hold  them  in  their 
accepted  sense,  and  thus  both  profess  that 
sense  and  teach  it.  What  has  been  said  as 
to  the  nature  and  life  of  God  is  also  ap- 
plicable to  the  person  and  work  of  Jesus 
Christ;  and  we  are  to  consider  to-day  our 
faith  in  Him  and  our  expression  of  that  faith 
in  language. 

I 

It  has  been  already  suggested  that  there 
are  matters,  great  and  small,  both  of  history 
and  of  observation,  which  we  accept  as  true 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  63 

and  as  influencing  our  lives,  though  for  us 
they  remain  facts  of  history  or  of  observa- 
tion, as  the  case  may  be.  We  inquire  into 
them  and  about  them;  we  try  to  learn  exactly 
what  they  mean,  how  they  came  about,  what 
underlies  them  by  way  of  cause  or  occasion, 
what  have  been  their  results,  and  what  in- 
fluence they  have  or  ought  to  have  upon 
ourselves;  we  draw  inferences  from  them,  and 
consider  them  a  part  of  our  mental,  if  not 
of  our  moral,  furnishing.  Some  of  them  are 
a  part  of  the  common  heritage  of  mankind, 
and  as  such  will  never  cease  to  interest  and 
to  instruct  civilized  men;  some  of  them  are 
of  unceasing  value  to  those  who  follow  out 
special  lines  of  study  or  investigation,  such 
as  lie  as  the  basis  of  science  or  of  certain  of 
its  applications;  while  others  are,  we  should 
say,  our  own  personal  property,  each  being 
an  experience  or  an  acquirement  of  our  own, 
which  affects  us  in  one  way  or  another  as  it 
enters  into  our  life  and  has  a  permanent 
influence  upon  it.  Thus  our  characters  are 
largely  moulded,  and  our  lives  directed,  by 
some  power  which  has  reached  us  from  with- 
out, by  some  person  or  by  what  some  per- 


64  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

son  has  said  or  done.  It  should  be  added, 
that  there  is  many  an  influence  working  upon 
us,  the  source  of  which  we  cannot  trace,  and 
of  the  very  existence  of  which  we  may  be 
ignorant. 

Of  all  these,  at  least  as  far  as  we  are 
conscious  of  them,  we  may  fairly  ask  whether 
there  is  discernible  in  them  the  working  of 
faith  as  bringing  knowledge  to  our  mind  and 
of  reason  as  testing  that  knowledge  and  com- 
mending it  to  us.  The  fact  of  history  or  of 
science,  of  influence  or  of  attraction,  may  not 
be  or  have  been  at  bottom  outside  the  range  of 
sight — that  is  to  say  of  the  bodily  or  mental 
powers,  to  discern  and  to  report;  but  when 
facts  thus  learned  in  themselves  become  the 
objects  of  thought,  the  inspiration  of  desire, 
the  incitements  of  will,  the  teachers  of  duty, 
we  are  convinced  that  there  is  more  in  them 
than  belongs  to  the  range  of  the  senses  or  of 
the  mind;  faith  has  come  to  make  at  least 
the  beginning  of  a  revelation  as  to  the  mean- 
ing of  what  has  been  otherwise  in  part  dis- 
closed, and  faith  has  called  upon  reason  to 
judge  of  the  truth,  the  reality,  of  that  which 
has  been  thus  presented  to  the  soul.     Faith 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  65 

looks  at  the  facts  of  nature,  of  history,  and 
of  character;  and  faith  presently  reports  that 
they  are  not  fully  known  until  she  brings 
them  into  her  light  and  shows  the  reality  of 
their  existence  and  of  their  meaning.  The 
mind  and  the  soul  of  man  are,  in  all  mat- 
ters of  any  serious  importance,  guided  and 
moved  by  faith. 

We  have  seen  a  great  example  of  this  in 
the  growth  of  man's  thought  of  God  and 
belief  in  Him:  that  in  some  wondrous  way 
man  received  the  great  truth  of  the  Unity 
of  God;  and  that  without  declining  from  the 
influence  of  this  great  truth  upon  him,  he 
was  led  to  see  that  in  the  life  of  the  God- 
head, the  life  of  the  eternal  Father,  there  is 
the  life  of  a  Word  and  a  Spirit,  and  almost  to 
confess  that  God  cannot  be  fully  known  save 
as  Father,  Son,  and  Spirit;  and  that  faith 
has  thus  made  ready  a  way  for  the  Christian 
revelation  contained  in  the  Triune  Name, 
before  it  was  clearly  taught  by^  the  risen 
Lord  and  by  the  Church  to  which  He  com- 
mitted its  promulgation. 

Now,  our  faith  in  God  leads  naturally  to 
our  faith  in  Jesus  Christ,  the  incarnate  Son 


66  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

of  God.  The  steps  by  which  the  Apostles 
and  those  whom  they  taught  arrived  at  that 
faith  in  Him  closely  resemble  those  by  which 
the  pious  men  of  Israel  in  the  later  days  of 
the  old  dispensation  arrived  at  a  readiness 
to  accept  faith  in  the  Triune  God.  The 
Word  of  God,  being  known  as  a  person, 
and  as  a  person  revealing  the  Eternal  One, 
might  readily  be  thought  of  as  coming  to 
live  among  men  and  to  speak  with  them  and 
to  them;  and  the  Spirit,  acknowledged  as 
having  at  least  personal  attributes,  might 
readily  be  believed  to  have  a  habitation  with 
men  through  the  Word.  There  were  lines  of 
faith  and  hope  and  longing  which  led  along 
this  way;  and  that  which  they  faintly  dis- 
closed was  so  real  that  it  could  not  fail,  we 
should  say,  to  come  at  the  last  to  a  clear  reve- 
lation. Especially,  if  we  acknowledge,  as  I 
think  we  must,  that  creation  is  a  revelation 
of  the  Word  of  God,  that  the  worlds,  the 
ages,  with  all  progress  in  things  material,  are 
His,  and  further  that  all  intellectual  and 
spiritual  existence  is  dependent  on  Him — 
if  we  confess  the  truth  of  the  profound 
utterance  of  the  prologue  of  St.  John's  Gos- 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  67 

pel,  that  in  the  Word  was  all  life  and  all 
light;  then  certainly  we  are  ready  for  that 
utterance  which  is  the  climax  of  the  prologue, 
that  the  Word  became  flesh  and  tabernacled 
in  us  and  we  beheld  His  glory.  This,  we 
confess,  we  might  expect;  but  the  great  pro- 
logue could  not  have  been  indited  until 
after  the  Word  was  known  as  incarnate. 
By  it  we  justify  our  acceptance  of  this  great 
truth  of  revelation;  but  no  saint  or  prophet 
could  have  written  its  words  until  that  of 
which  they  thus  told  had  come  to  pass.  The 
distinct  faith  in  the  Incarnation,  in  Jesus 
Christ  as  Son  of  God  and  Son  of  man,  be- 
longs to  the  days  of  the  New  Testament. 

II 

This  faith  is  emphatically  personal;  and  it 
sprang  from  knowledge  of  a  person  and 
personal  attachment  to  Him.  A  man  named 
Jesus  (Joshua,  Victorious,  Saviour)  lived 
for  a  short  time  among  men  in  the  Holy 
Land  after  it  had  become  part  of  a  province 
of  the  Roman  Empire.  He  dwelt  quietly 
and  humbly  in  a  small  but  fairly  busy  city 
until  He  was  about  thirty  years  old,  when 


68  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

the  minds  of  men  were  stirred  by  the  re- 
port that  the  prophetic  power  of  the  Spirit 
had  returned  and  that  one  enthusiastic 
prophet  was  declaring  that  the  kingdom  of 
heaven  was  soon  to  be  revealed.  Starting, 
as  it  seemed,  to  follow  that  prophet,  He 
was  confessed  by  him  to  be  greater  than 
himself  and  the  Lamb  of  God;  while  pres- 
ently one  of  the  forerunner's  disciples  de- 
clared Him  to  be  the  promised  Messiah,  and 
another  acknowledged  Him  as  Son  of  God 
and  King  of  Israel.  For  three  years  the 
wondrous  personality  of  this  Man  then 
showed  itself,  with  its  extraordinary  power 
of  attraction  and  repulsion,  in  words  and 
deeds  mostly  along  unexpected  ways  and 
often  with  unexpected  results;  and  while  He 
was  yet  in  early  manhood.  His  life  came  to 
a  violent  and  shameful  end.  A  few  disciples 
had  partly  understood  Him,  and  they  would 
have  been  slow  to  forget  Him;  but  in  those 
excited  times  the  petty  triumph  of  His 
enemies  and  the  sad  disappointment  of  His 
followers  might  have  slipped  away  into  the 
forgotten  or  indifferently  remembered  past, 
had  it  not  been  for  the  rumor  and  then  the 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  69 

assertion  and  then  the  public  proclamation 
that  He  was  alive,  that  He  had  passed  on 
beyond  the  power  of  death,  that  He  was  with 
God,  and  that  from  God  He  had  sent  the 
full  gift  of  the  expected  Spirit,  Whose  power 
was  manifesting  itself  in  very  remarkable 
ways.  There  were  many  who  asked  the 
question,  and  many  more  who  were  looking 
for  an  answer  to  the  question:  Who  was,  who 
is,  this  teacher  and  leader  of  men,  Joshua 
by  name,  Messiah  by  the  title  which  His 
followers  claim  for  Him?  He  certainly  was 
man;  His  life  of  thirty  years  showed  it; 
and  all  that  marked  humanity  belonged  to 
the  lowly  boy  of  rightfully  noble  parentage, 
the  studious  and  godly  youth,  the  artisan 
instructed  in  the  busy  world  of  action,  the 
harmoniously  developed  Man,  who  for  a 
short  time  was  a  leader  of  men  in  ways  of 
right  and  their  opponent  in  wrongful  ways; 
who  suffered,  was  crucified,  died,  and  was 
buried.  Certainly  He  was  man;  and  He 
called  Himself  the  Son  of  Man. 

Quite  as  certainly — His  immediate  follow- 
ers and  those  whom  they  influenced  had 
begun  to  say — He  was  more  than  man.     The 


70  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

beauty  and  balance  and  perfectness  of  His 
character  were  beyond  what  man  had  ever 
shown  before;  even  if  His  Mother  had  not 
told  as  yet  the  story  of  His  conception  and 
birth,  He  Himself  had  said  that  He  had 
come  forth  from  the  Father  and  come  into 
the  world;  He  had  affirmed  that  all  things 
had  been  delivered  to  Him  by  the  Father; 
He  had  made  allegiance  to  Himself  to  be 
the  sufficient  test  of  character;  He  had  de- 
clared that  He  was  to  be  the  Judge  of  man- 
kind; He  had,  as  some  at  least  had  under- 
stood Him,  claimed  a  place  with  Almighty 
God;  and  indeed  divine  honors  and  homage 
were  very  soon  rendered  to  Him.* 

Was  He  then  man,  who  had  by  holiness 
found  a  way  to  the  might  and  glory  of 
the  Godhead?  Was  He  God,  Who  had 
lived  awhile  on  earth  in  the  likeness  of  man? 
Some,  as  we  know,  in  early  days,  did  affirm 
that  He  was  but  man,  through  Whom  to  a 
greater  or  a  less  extent  God  was  revealed; 
and  some  declared  that  He  was  all  divine, 
humanity  being  but  a  garb  assumed  by  Him 

*  John  xvi.  28;  Matthew  xi.  27,  xxviii.  18,  vii.  22,  23,  xvi. 
27;  John  v.  19-29. 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  71 

for  a  time,  or  more  probably  sheer  unreality. 
Each  answer  to  the  great  question  was 
easily  framed  and  speciously  proposed,  for 
each  denied  or  ignored  or  explained  away 
the  facts  which  might  point  to  the  other. 
Each  was  based  on  imperfect  understanding 
or  knowledge;  neither,  as  we  shall  presently 
see,  was  the  answer  of  faith;  neither  could 
be  given  by  one  who  believed  in  Jesus  the 
Christ. 

Moreover — and  this  it  is  of  the  utmost 
importance  to  note — those  who  actually  knew 
the  Man  Jesus  were  firm  believers  that  He 
was  Lord  and  Christ;  and  those  who  first 
came  to  recognize  Him  as  their  Divine  Lord 
bore  witness  also  to  the  reality  of  His 
humanity.  What  did  Peter  think  and  say 
of  Him,  the  Apostle  who  had  made  such 
strong  confession  of  Him,  had  seen  His  glory 
in  the  holy  mount,  had  yet  denied  Him 
in  the  time  of  trial,  and  had  been  restored 
by  Him  when  He  accepted  his  great  repent- 
ance? What  was  the  belief  and  the  testi- 
mony of  that  other  disciple,  who  entered 
into  his  Lord's  affection,  who  forsook  Him 
not    at    the    Cross,    and    went    to    the    tomb 


7a  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

prepared  to  believe  the  resurrection?  What 
did  he  say,  whom  men  called  His  brother, 
who  had  lived  with  Him  from  childhood 
until  both  were  grown-up  men,  who  shared 
with  Him  the  appellation  of  the  Just? 
None  of  them  could  ever  have  doubted  that 
the  Lord,  as  they  came  to  call  Him,  was 
truly  man;  that  which  they  had  heard  and 
seen  and  handled  made  it  certain  that  He 
was,  in  all  that  goes  to  make  up  human 
nature,  as  really  human  as  themselves;  but 
the  wonder  of  it  was  that,  as  they  looked 
back  after  the  resurrection,  they  could  see 
that  all  the  time  He  had  been  not  merely 
revealing  God,  but  revealing  Himself  as 
God.  None  of  those  who  best  could  know 
denied  the  humanity,  and  yet  all  of  them 
confessed  the  deity,  of  their  Master.  Neither 
Peter  nor  John  nor  James  explained  what 
He  taught  or  put  it  at  once  in  terms  of 
speech  or  thought;  but  from  their  very  being 
with  Christ  they  learned  through  faith, 
through  personal  confidence  in  Him  and  per- 
sonal attachment  to  Him,  who  He  was.  The 
chief  Apostle  on  the  day  of  Pentecost  and 
ever  after  was  ready  to  undo  his  denial  by 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  73 

most  confident  profession  that  in  the  glorified 
Lord  was  all  life  and  salvation,  that  His 
sufferings  and  the  glory  following  could 
bring  man  to  God.*  The  disciple  who  wrote 
of  himself  as  loved  by  the  Master  was  al- 
most vehement  in  his  declaration  that  the 
Son  of  God,  Jesus  Christ,  was  with  the 
Father  to  be  worshipped  and  glorified,  and 
was  indeed  the  very  source  of  reality  and  of 
life.t  The  just  one,  whom  the  Lord  chose 
to  care  specially  for  the  mother  congregation 
of  His  disciples  at  Jerusalem,  who  had 
known  the  Lord  as  man  more  intimately  (we 
may  assume)  than  those  others,  placed  his 
Brother  not  with  man  but  with  God;  he 
described  himself  as  "  servant  of  God  and 
of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ,"  while  another 
member  of  the  same  household  announced 
himself  as  servant  of  Jesus  Christ  and 
brother  of  James. $ 

And  as  to  Saul  of  Tarsus,  whose  faith 
had  not  grown  by  the  experiences  of  youth 
and  early  manhood  or  even  by  those  of  three 

*Acts  ii.  36;  I.  Peter  iii.  18,  22. 
t  John  i.  Iff.;  I.  John  i.  Iff. 
$  James  i.  1;  Jude  1. 


74  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

years'  close  intimacy,  but  in  whom,  what- 
ever the  preparation  for  it,  it  burst  forth  in 
the  strong  conviction  of  a  great  soul  which 
has  been  seeking  for  the  truth  and  to  whom 
it  is  suddenly  revealed — the  Paul  of  the 
Acts  and  the  Epistles — need  we  argue  Who 
Jesus  Christ  was  to  his  mind,  his  affections, 
his  faith?  As  surely  as  the  Almighty  Father 
is  God,  so  surely  for  him  Jesus  Christ  is  the 
pre-existing  Son  of  God,  "  over  all  God 
blessed  for  ever,"  and  in  his  constant  dox- 
ologies  he  anticipates  the  formularies  of  the 
Church's  worship,  ascribing  glory  to  the 
Father  and  the  Son  and  the  Holy  Ghost.* 
Such  was  the  early  faith  of  the  followers  of 
Christ;  when  asked  who  He  is,  their  souls 
replied  in  faith,  though  their  lips  had  not 
yet  learned  to  confess  in  exact  form  of  words : 
He  is  the  very  Son  of  God,  Who  came  down 
from  heaven,  and  took  to  Himself  the  nature 
of  man  for  man's  redemption,  and  is  now 
with  God.  It  was  following  generations, 
deficient  in  faith  but  anxious  to  argue,  which 
framed  easier  answers  and  denied,  now  the 

•Romans  i.  1-4,  ix.  5;  I.  Corinthians  xii.  4-6;  Colossians  i. 
15-18. 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  76 

humanity  and  now  the  deity  of  Christ,  and 
now  strangely  enough  both  the  humanity  and 
the  deity. 

It  would  take  us  too  far  astray  if  we 
should  attempt  to  follow,  even  in  outline, 
the  argumentative  questions  and  controversies 
M^hich  troubled  the  Church  for  so  long  a 
time.  It  is  enough  to  recall  (1)  that  there 
was  a  period  of  simple  faith  which  preceded 
those  years  of  controversy;  (2)  that  there 
was  a  strong  and  quiet  faith  which  kept  the 
undercurrent  of  the  Church's  belief  and 
practice  simple  and  pure;  and  (3)  that  when 
the  Church  came  to  herself  it  was  to  find 
that  she  had  tested  her  God-inspired  faith 
by  her  God-bestowed  power  of  reason  and 
had  found  that  it  could  endure  the  test. 
For  what  were  the  facts,  belonging  to  the 
unseen,  really  facts  though  they  could  not  be 
proved  by  the  evidence  of  the  senses,  facts 
that  came  from  the  knowledge  of  person  by 
person,  a  personal  attraction  on  the  one  hand 
and  a  personal  allegiance  on  the  other?  Men 
found  a  Man  Who  moved  within  them  a 
knowledge  of  Himself,  nay  rather,  as  on  the 
very  morrow  of  the  baptism,  men  knew  that 


76  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

a  Man  had  found  them  and  had  quickened 
in  their  souls  faith  in  Himself.*  They  knew 
that  He  was  man;  they  soon  discerned  that 
in  some  wondrous  way,  as  He  touched  them, 
so  He  was  touched  by  God  or  even  "  pro- 
ceeded forth  and  came  from  God."  If  they 
did  not  readily  grasp  the  truth  of  His  pre- 
existence  with  God  (Ttpo?  rov  Qs6v),  He  pres- 
ently suggested  it  to  them  and  it  scarce 
startled  them,  so  natural  did  it  seem;  they 
had  faith  in  Him  as  divine.  Practically  then, 
faith  taught  them  that  He  Whom  they  had 
called  Jesus  and  acknowledged  as  Christ  was 
the  Son  of  God;  that  He  had  been  born 
into  the  world  of  man  in  order  that  the 
promises  might  be  fulfilled,  and  that  man 
by  His  sufferings  and  victory  might  attain 
a  new  life.  They  had  faith — for  now  we 
may  without  hesitation  use  the  formal  lan- 
guage of  the  age  of  the  Councils — that  the 
Son  of  God,  a  Person  with  the  divine  nature, 
had  taken  to  Himself  human  nature,  and 
that  thus  He  was  one  Christ,  very  God  and 
very  Man.  Of  course,  the  simple  faith  found 
a  simple  expression;  what  we  call  the  Faith 

♦  John  i.  35-51. 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  77 

did  not  come  to  the  intellect  in  definition  till 
long  after  faith  in  its  truth  had  entered  into 
the  souls  of  believers  and  been  accepted  by 
them.  Those  prepared  souls,  of  whom  we 
have  spoken  before,  who  were  waiting  for 
the  outpouring  of  the  Spirit  and  the  day  of 
redemption,  prepared  to  sing  the  Benedictus, 
who  almost  had  a  clear  revelation  of  the 
Word,  were  prepared  to  accept  the  truth 
of  the  Incarnation  when  in  the  fulness  of  the 
times  God  should  send  forth  His  Son.  No 
great  truth  has  ever  come  to  an  unprepared 
world;  certainly  this  great  revelation  could 
not  so  come.  The  spiritual  fact  or  act  called 
forth  faith,  and  faith  recognizing  the  great 
reality  accepted  it  and  held  it  fast.  St.  John 
did  not  for  the  first  time  when  he  indited  his 
great  Epistle  say,  "  We  know  that  the  Son 
of  God  is  come  ";  he  knew  better  indeed  than 
at  the  first  what  that  knowledge  meant;  but 
we  may  doubt  whether  the  fathers  of  Nicgea 
or  of  Chalcedon  or  the  pious  scholars  of 
later  days  knew  it  more  surely  or  with  more 
full  comprehension  than  did  he.  For  the 
faith,  when  it  needs  to  be  put  into  words,  is 
but  the  expression,  the  finite  expression,  of 


78  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

faith  which  is  indefinable    (that  is,  infinite), 
but  which  is  both  real  and  strong. 

Ill 

Such  was  the  faith  of  our  Lord's  first 
disciples,  faith  in  Him,  real  and  strong,  but 
as  yet  not  clearly  defined  either  in  thought 
or  in  expression.  They  knew  Him,  they  were 
drawn  to  Him,  they  put  their  full  trust  in 
Him,  they  believed  in  Him.  And  this  was 
the  Lord's  demand  which  He  made  of  those 
who  heard  Him  and  would  become  His  dis- 
ciples. With  His  great  humility  there  was 
always  joined  the  call  to  men  and  women 
and  children  to  come  to  Him,  not  only  that 
they  might  hear  and  obey  Him,  but  also  that 
they  might  give  themselves  to  Him  and  test 
themselves  by  their  relation  to  Him.  The 
Sermon  on  the  Mount  does  not  belong,  we 
now  think,  to  a  very  early  place  in  our  Lord's 
ministry,  though  it  stands  early  in  the  narra- 
tive of  St.  Matthew's  Gospel;  but  its  teach- 
ing is  equally  wonderful,  whether  it  was 
spoken  a  few  months  or  two  years  after  His 
baptism.  And  its  chief  lesson,  I  venture  to 
say,  is  not  so  much  in  the  Beatitudes  or  in 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  T9 

the  expansion  of  the  ancient  Law  or  in  the 
inculcation  of  moral  duties,  as  in  the  sense 
of  want  which  it  first  produces  and  in  the 
declaration  that  the  supply  of  that  want  could 
be  found  in  the  Speaker  Himself.  The  Ser- 
mon is  first  a  conviction  of  ignorance  and 
weakness  and  sin;  but  at  the  close  the 
Speaker  declares  Himself  to  be  the  Judge  of 
men,  Whose  approbation  is  for  them  the 
measure  of  success,  and  Who  is  Himself  the 
foundation  on  which  all  lasting  character 
must  be  built.*  Those  who  listened  to  His 
words  and  thought  upon  them  were  aware, 
not  only  of  the  authority  by  which  He  ex- 
panded or  corrected  that  which  had  been 
said  to  men  of  old  time,  but  also  of  the  con- 
fident dignity  with  which  He  bade  men  find 
a  new  inspiration  in  their  acquaintance  with 
Himself.  And  in  faith  men  heard  and 
yielded  to  His  call  and  accepted  Him,  and 
made  themselves  ready  for  some  greater  ven- 
ture of  faith  and  obedience  as  He  should  re- 
quire it  of  their  hearts  and  hands. 

This   revelation   of   Himself   as   man,    yet 
beyond  man,  was  in  a  way   summed  up  in 

♦  Matthew  vii.  21-27. 


80  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

our  Lord's  calling  Himself  the  Son  of  Man.* 
In  what  way  exactly  the  title  was  drawn 
from  earlier  prophetic  and  apocalyptic  use, 
we  may  not  stop  to  inquire;  but  in  the  record 
of  Daniel's  visions,  with  which  the  men  of 
our  Lord's  time  were  certainly  familiar,  the 
Son  of  Man  was  revealed  with  the  Ancient  of 
Days,  being  brought  near  to  Him  and  receiv- 
ing from  Him  glory  and  honor  and  dominion.t 
And  though  it  need  not  have  signified  the 
divine  nature  in  Him  to  Whom  the  title  was 
given,  it  did  mean  that  He  was  in  that  rela- 
tion to  God  which  belonged  to  the  archetypal 
man,  to  one  who  at  least  represented  man 
before  God  and  God  before  man.  The  word 
was  a  test  of  faith,  and  the  understanding 
and  use  of  it  was  an  act  of  faith;  for  through 
Him  as  made  known  by  this  lofty  title  was 
the  sure  approach  to  Him  as  the  Son  of 
God. 

This  name  and  this  faith  are  recorded  in 
the  Gospels.  We  gather  from  the  form  of 
Christ's  great  challenge  and  St.  Peter's  an- 
swer, that — if  we  may  venture  thus  to  ex- 
press ourselves — the  Lord  asked  with  anxiety 

•First  in  Mark  ii.  10.  f Daniel  vii.  13. 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  81 

as  to  what  the  reply  would  be,  and  the 
Apostle  answered  as  having  been  forced  by 
the  question  to  decide  what  he  did  in  reality 
believe.  "  If  men  call  Me  a  prophet  of  the 
olden  time,  Who  do  ye  say  that  I  am? 
Do  ye  say  as  much  as  they,  or  can  ye  say 
as  much?"  "Surely,  we  must  answer;  we 
make  the  bold  confession;  it  is  in  our  hearts, 
though  we  did  not  know  it:  Thou  art  the 
Messiah;  nay.  Thou  art  the  Son  of  the  living 
God."  And  then  the  Lord's  acceptance  of 
the  confession  is  not  only  an  expression  of 
relief;  it  is  a  declaration  of  the  power  of 
truth  revealed  to  faith  and  acknowledged  by 
faith:  "Blessed  art  thou,  Simon;  thou  hast 
been  granted  a  revelation  from  My  Father  " 
— thus  He  accepts  the  name  of  Son — "  and 
thou  hast  received  it."  *  Thus  to  this  faith 
the  Apostle,  for  himself  and  for  the  rest, 
was  committed;  from  it  they  swerved,  indeed, 
but  it  never  quite  lost  hold  on  them,  and  in 
the  after  years  it  opened  into  the  words  on 
which  the  confession  of  the  Church  has  been 
framed.  All  was  implicit  in  the  simple  trust 
of  those  who  could  not  but  follow  and  be- 

*  Matthew  xvi.  13  ff. 


82  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

lieve  in  Jesus  of  Nazareth  when  they   saw 
Him  and  He  called  them. 

IV 

Devout  men,  we  have  seen,  were  expecting 
a  redeeming  Messiah  Who  was  to  come  when 
the  Spirit  should  again  be  poured  out  upon 
God's  people  from  on  high.  The  prophetic 
Spirit  had  returned  in  the  preaching  of  John 
Baptist  and  the  hymns  of  Zacharias  the  priest 
and  Mary  the  virgin.  To  them,  while  wait- 
ing for  the  Christ,  there  came  the  Son  of  God. 
How  soon,  we  may  ask,  and  how  readily,  did 
they  connect  these  terms,  and  see  that  the 
Anointed  one  must  be  in  some  true  sense 
divine  ?  St.  John's  interpretive  record  puts  on 
the  lips  of  one  disciple  at  the  very  moment  of 
his  call  the  words,  "  Rabbi,  Thou  art  the  Son 
of  God,  Thou  art  the  King  of  Israel  " ;  *  and 
it  also  makes  the  Lord's  first  distinct  assertion 
of  His  Messiahship  to  have  been  to  the 
Samaritan  woman  whom  He  met  at  Jacob's 
well,  and  the  formal  acknowledgment  of  it 
to  have  been  from  the  men  of  her  city.  "  I 
know,"    said    she,    "  that    Messiah    cometh " ; 

♦  John  i.  49. 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  83 

and  the  Lord  answered,  "  I  Who  speak  unto 
thee  am  He."  And  within  a  few  days  the 
people  of  Sychar  said,  "  We  know  that  this 
is  truly  the  Saviour  of  the  world."  *  Was  it 
given  to  the  Apostle  to  know  in  after  years 
the  full  meaning  of  thoughts  which  were  im- 
perfectly expressed  at  the  time,  and  to  put 
that  full  meaning  into  the  words  of  his  narra- 
tive? Or  did  some  tell  him,  a  few  years 
later,  when  he  went  with  Peter  to  lay  his 
hands  upon  those  in  the  city  of  Samaria 
who  had  been  converted  at  the  preaching  of 
Philip  t — did  perhaps  this  very  woman  and 
some  of  these  very  men  tell  him,  how  their 
hearts  had  been  stirred  at  the  presence  and 
by  the  words  of  the  Jewish  Rabbi  Who  con- 
descended to  talk  with  them  and  to  visit 
them?  And  did  He  then  interpret  in  the 
words  of  His  Gospel  the  meaning  of  their 
thoughts  and  of  the  faith  which  then  had  its 
beginning?  Or  is  this  an  example  of  the 
unexpected  ways  in  which  Christ  wrought 
and  spoke,  so  often  doing  what  we  shoidd 
not  have  expected  Him  to  do,  and  speaking 
in    words   which    we   were   not   prepared    to 

•John  iv.  25,  26,  42.  f  Acts  viii.  14. 


84  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

hear  from  His  lips?  We  know  not;  the 
world,  Jewish  and  Samaritan  and  Gentile, 
was  strangely  moved  at  that  time  by  the 
Spirit  Whose  comings  and  goings  man  can- 
not determine  or  understand;  and  there  may 
be  a  lesson  for  us,  as  we  learn  of  divine 
guidance  into  truth  bestowed  upon  some  with 
whom  we  should  not  expect  to  find  it,  and 
read  of  a  revelation  made  and  received  in 
Samaria  which  was  not  given  as  yet  in  Judaea ; 
even  as  we  may  wonder  that  the  Apostles' 
confession  was  not  made  in  the  courts  of 
the  temple  and  within  the  Holy  City,  but 
in  the  almost  heathen  region  of  the  Csesarea 
of  Philip. 

But  put  all  these  words  of  faith  together; 
think  of  the  many  other  movings  of  faith 
which  there  must  have  been  among  those  who 
heard  and  saw  the  Lord;  consider  what 
underlay  the  preparedness  of  thousands  to 
confess  Christ  when  His  resurrection  was 
preached  in  the  power  of  the  Spirit  coming 
as  His  Spirit;  and  you  will  see  what  all  that 
beginning  faith  meant.  Allow  all  that  you 
must  for  their  imperfect  apprehension  of 
what  was  brought  to  their  minds  or  even  of 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  85 

what  they  said;  grant,  as  you  must,  that 
their  conception  of  Messiahship  and  divine 
Sonship  was  inadequate  and  inconsistent;  yet 
in  New  Testament  days  men  did  arrive  at 
the  assurance  with  which  St.  John  closed  his 
Epistle,  "  We  know  that  the  Son  of  God  is 
come,"  and  even  at  the  stupendous  confession 
with  which  he  prefaced  his  Gospel,  "  The 
Word  Who  tabernacled  among  us  was  God," 
©£o?  Tjy  6  \6yo<;.^  This  was  faith  anticipating 
the  Faith,  the  Gospel-faith  anticipating — ^yes, 
already  moulding — the  Nicene  and  Chalce- 
donian  theology;  the  great  truths  acknowl- 
edged before  they  could  be  expressed,  and 
influencing  men  who  could  not  have  made  at 
the  time  a  careful  statement  of  them.  Men 
believed  in  Jesus  Christ,  Son  of  God  and  Son 
of  Man,  Who  for  their  sakes  came  down 
from  heaven,  gained  the  great  victory,  and 
became  Lord  over  all  things.  It  was  a  most 
wonderful  and  a  most  natural  faith;  and 
years  after,  fully  tested  by  reason  and  by  ex- 
perience, it  was  framed  in  words  that  the 
wise  might  defend  what  the  simple-hearted 
knew  and  the  Church  might  teach  clearly  and 

*  I.  John  V.  20;  John  i.  1,  14. 


86  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

boldly  that  which  had  been  revealed  and  en- 
trusted to  her  as  truth. 

V 

We  do  well  to  note,  I  think,  that  as  the 
Gospels,  in  their  teaching  about  Christ,  pre- 
pare the  way  for  the  Epistles,  so  the  Johan- 
nine  and  Pauline  theology  prepares  the  way 
for  the  Councils.  But  here  also  it  is  faith 
preparing  the  way  for  the  Faith,  the  Church's 
Creeds.  Arriving  at  faith  in  Christ  along 
different  paths,  with  minds  differently 
constituted  for  recognizing  and  holding 
truth,  with  souls  trained  by  widely  differ- 
ing experiences,  St.  Paul  and  St.  John 
had  equally  strong  faith  in  Jesus  Christ, 
the  Son  of  God,  the  Redeemer  of  mankind. 
The  one  Apostle  saw  in  faith  man's  hand 
stretched  out  to  receive  God's  forgiving 
grace,  and  he  insisted  on  the  doctrine  of 
justification;  the  other  found  in  it  rather  the 
gift  of  the  life  of  God  to  man,  and  he  dwelt 
on  its  victorious  power;  but  both  were  con- 
scious of  the  great  truths  as  to  Christ,  His 
divine  Person  in  its  relation  to  the  Father, 
His  human  nature  taking  hold  of  ours  and 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  87 

by  ours  received.  That  personal  relationship 
to  Him  which  faith  connotes,  each  had  gained 
and  could  not  lose;  that  knowledge  of  Him 
which  cannot  be  told,  each  had  experienced. 
It  was  not  in  the  same  way  that  all  who  be- 
lieved in  the  Father  came  to  believe  also  in 
the  Son  and  in  the  Spirit;  yet  the  disciples 
of  all  Christian  teachers  were  learning  truths 
which  brought  them  finally  to  acknowledge 
the  glory  of  the  eternal  Trinity.  It  was  not 
in  the  same  way  that  all  who  believed  in 
Jesus  Christ  came  to  confess  Him  as  the  Son 
of  God  incarnate,  the  Word  made  flesh,  yet 
they  all  were  brought  to  the  same  acknowl- 
edgment that  He  was  in  unity  of  Person 
perfect  God  and  perfect  Man.  By  the  guid- 
ance of  the  Spirit,  man's  loftiest  faculty  of 
reason  tested  that  which  faith  had  learned 
and  submitted  to  it;  and  affirming  its  truth, 
it  bore  witness  also  to  its  value,  both  abso- 
lutely and  in  its  due  proportion  {dvaXoyia, 
as  St.  Paul  calls  it).  And  thus  when  for- 
mulas were  needed,  reason  threw  faith  upon 
itself,  and  bade  men  say  of  the  great  truths 
thus  doubly  witnessed,  "  I  believe."  But 
before  the  formula  came  faith,  sure  yet  unde- 


88  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

fined;  and  before  the  formula  came  also  in  a 
sense  the  Faith,  confessed  before  controversy 
had  made  it  necessary  to  guard  rigidly  the 
meanings  of  words.  The  simple  faith  of 
those  who  know  the  Saviour  Whom  they  have 
believed  has  always  been  their  salvation  and 
their  life;  and  to  it  the  words  of  wise  scholars 
and  theologians  should  lead  us  back. 

Of  those  statements,  as  necessarily  as  care- 
fully framed,  let  us  not  speak  in  any  depre- 
ciatory tone.  They  were  framed  by  men 
whose  duty  it  was  to  state  in  clearest  terms 
the  truths  presented  to  the  soul  by  faith  and 
corroborated  by  Scripture,  that  they  might 
guide  the  uninstructed  and  support  the  weak 
and  guard  those  whom  the  enemies  of  truth 
might  lead  astray.  They  were  cast  in  words 
of  the  Greek  language,  the  nearest  perfec- 
tion in  man's  means  of  expression  as  well  of 
philosophical  as  of  poetic  truth;  and  the 
whole  Christian  world  for  centuries  has 
known  their  meaning  and  has  consented  to  it. 
If  at  any  time  they  shall  need  to  be  recast, 
it  will  be  because  words  have  utterly  changed 
their  meaning,  or  because  thought  has  taken 
quite  new  moulds  of  expression,  or  because 


FAITH  IN  JESUS  CHRIST  89 

the  centre  of  influence  has  so  changed  that 
a  language  of  quite  another  type  is  needed 
for  the  scholarly  and  thoughtful  Christian 
world.  This  will  not  happen  in  our  day; 
but  perhaps  we  ought  to  be  considering  how 
far  we  should  insist  on  the  reception  of  our 
formularies,  European  in  form  with  a  Semitic 
background,  upon  races  whose  language  and 
philosophic  thought  are  utterly  different  from 
ours.  We  cannot  carry  them  the  Gospel  as 
if  it  had  just  come  into  the  world;  we  are 
responsible  for  what  we  have  learned  since 
the  first  century  as  well  as  for  what  we  have 
received  from  the  Apostolic  Church;  but  the 
time  may  come  when  we  must  study  well 
the  acceptable  and  persuasive  mould  of 
Christian  truth,  that  it  may  prove  itself  to 
be  the  power  and  the  wisdom  of  God  to 
nations  of  a  far  different  type  from  our 
own.  Perhaps  that  problem  is  nearer  us 
than  we   think.* 


But   the    truth   for   all    ages    and   for    all 
peoples  is  the  same.     And  faith  for  all  ages 

*  See  a  suggestive  article  on  The  Western  Form  of  Chris- 
tianity in  The  East  and  the  West,  April,  1913. 


90  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

and  for  all  peoples  is  the  same.  There  is 
one  living  and  true  God,  in  the  unity  of 
Whose  Godhead  there  are  with  the  Father 
His  Son  and  His  life-giving  Spirit;  there 
is  one  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  the  Son  incarnate, 
the  Redeemer  of  men.  The  relation  of  our 
souls  to  our  God  and  Saviour  is  such  that 
we  know  Him  by  faith,  and  trusting  Him 
enter  into  His  very  life  and  live  by  it.  And 
this  personal  relation  may  grow  stronger  and 
stronger  and  be  the  sole  moving  power  of 
our  spiritual  and  moral  and  intellectual  life, 
in  the  vigor  of  which  life  we  shall  find  the 
fulness  of  victorious  salvation.  Believe  in 
God;  believe  in  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ;  be- 
lieve in  God's  Holy  Spirit;  thus  shall  faith 
make  us  strong,  because  our  lives  shall  be 
lives  of  faith. 


LECTURE  IV 
FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT 

I.  Corinthians  xii.  S. 

Ovdei^  dvvaTai,  elirelv  Kvptof  'iTjoovq  t\  fi^  kv  -KvevfiaTi  ayi(i). 
*'  No  one  can  say  Lord  Jesus  except  in  Holy  Spirit." 

To  complete  our  study  of  Faith  in  God, 
Who  is  its  one  great  source  and  object,  we 
need  to  turn  our  thoughts  to  the  Holy 
Spirit.  He,  in  the  true  sense  of  the  word 
'  spirit,'  is  the  life  of  God  as  it  shows  itself 
and  acts  and  is  appropriated  in  the  soul  of 
man.  He,  also,  because  the  life  which  He  is 
and  imparts  is  divine,  is  the  great  principle 
and  revelation  of  order  in  the  universe  and 
in  the  world  of  man.  His  working  combines 
both  freedom  and  law;  its  results  are  beauty 
and  strength.  "  Glory  and  worship  are  with 
Him,  power  and  honor  are  in  His  every 
sanctuary."  The  religious  man  must  have 
faith  in  the  Holy  Spirit,  must  use  His 
power,    must    learn    truth    from    Him,    for 

91 


9^  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

"  He  searcheth  out  all  things,  even  the  depths 
divine." 


The  revelation  of  God's  Spirit,  as  we  have 
seen,  began  to  be  made  in  the  early  days. 
We  may  not  readily  distinguish — and  we 
may  well  believe  that  the  early  writers  did 
not  intend  to  distinguish — between  the  breath 
of  God  which  brooded  over  the  waters  at  the 
world's  beginning,  which  breathing  upon 
man  at  the  beginning  of  his  conscious  life 
as  man  made  him  living  soul,  which  spoke 
in  the  thoughts  and  by  the  words  of  pro- 
phetic men,  and  the  Spirit  recognized  (at 
least  imperfectly)  as  a  person  with  powers 
of  instruction  and  persuasion  and  revelation. 
Even  for  us  the  distinction  is  not  always 
clear  in  the  writings  of  the  Apostles  and 
saints  of  the  Church  and  in  our  deepest 
meditation  on  the  things  of  God;  and  in  the 
olden  times  it  sufficed  that  men  recognized 
the  voice  of  God  as  speaking  to  them  and 
His  life  as  shaping  their  lives.  "  Take  not 
thy  Holy  Spirit  from  me  " ;  *  we  should  be 

*  Psalm  li.  11. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  93 

hardly  surprised  to  find  these  words  assigned 
to  some  pious  patriarch  under  the  earliest 
covenant,  and  their  occurrence  in  the  Miserere 
can  hardly  help  us  to  assign  that  Psalm  to 
any  period  or  date.  We  cannot  say  what 
any  penitent  of  Old  Testament  times  must 
have  meant  when  he  prayed  that  God  would 
not  take  away  from  him  His  holy  breath  or 
His  holy  life,  but  it  would  mean  at  least  that 
the  sinner,  turning  from  his  sin,  was  praying 
that  God  would  not  drive  him  away  from  the 
only  source  of  life  and  light — "  Cast  me  not 
away  from  Thy  presence "  is,  as  you  will 
remember,  the  parallel  to  these  words — and 
thus   deprive  him  of  strength. 

But  certainly,  as  we  read  the  later  writings 
of  the  old  covenant,  we  do  find  that  to  the 
Spirit  of  God  are  attributed  qualities  which 
we  cannot  but  call  personal.  Guided  by 
prophecy,  and  quickened  by  the  lively  and 
almost  tense  expectation  which  marked  the 
elect  in  the  days  that  ushered  in  the  advent 
of  the  incarnate  Son  of  God,  the  hope  of 
earlier  times  became  the  assurance  of  those 
who  were  waiting  for  the  light  of  the  day- 
spring  from  on  high.     They  were  ready — it, 


94*  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

is  not  too  much  to  say  it — for  the  coming  of 
the  Son  and  of  the  Spirit  of  God,  that  there 
might  be  a  full  revelation  of  the  eternal  God- 
head. I  will  not  pause  to  remind  you  again 
of  that  which  I  suggested  in  an  earlier  lec- 
ture, that  on  the  first  pages  of  the  Gospel 
we  read  of  the  work  of  the  Holy  Spirit,  no 
preparation  being  made  for  the  announce- 
ment of  His  appearance  such  as  is  made  for 
the  proclamation  of  the  coming  of  the  Son 
of  God;  and  that,  alike  in  the  words  of  the 
narrative  and  in  those  which  enshrine  the 
teaching  of  our  Lord,  we  find  mention  of  the 
Spirit  and  of  His  work.  The  Spirit  testifies 
to  Him  from  His  conception  to  the  end  of 
His  ministry;  one  of  the  Lord's  greatest 
utterances  after  His  resurrection  is  that  in 
which  He  bade  His  disciples  to  "  take  Holy 
Spirit,"  while  the  other  is  the  inclusion  of 
the  Holy  Spirit  with  the  Father  and  the 
Son  in  the  revelation  of  that  Name  of  God 
whereby  He  was  to  be  known  in  the 
Church  until  the  consummation  of  the  pres- 
ent age.* 

As  we  pass  to  the  book  of  the  Acts  of 

*  John  XX.  23 ;  Matthew  xxviii.  19. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  95 

the  Apostles,  how  can  this  be  better  de- 
scribed than  as  the  Gospel  of  the  Spirit? 
For  from  the  day  of  Pentecost  on  which 
His  gifts  were  poured  out  upon  the  Church 
until  the  day  when  at  Rome  the  new  Apostle 
exhorting  the  Jews  quoted  the  words  which 
He,  the  Spirit,  spake  by  a  prophet  to  the 
fathers  of  old  time,*  the  book  is  concerned 
with  the  bestowal  of  the  Spirit,  His  mani- 
fold gifts,  and  the  divine  ways  in  which  those 
who  had  them  were  trained  to  use  them  to 
the  honor  of  the  one  Lord  of  all  men  whom 
He  called  into  His  Church.  In  fact,  the 
working  and  the  work  of  the  Spirit  is  so 
constantly  assumed  as  lying  beneath  all  that 
is  purposed  and  done,  the  manifestation  of 
His  power  is  so  constant  wherever  the  Gospel 
is  preached,  and  His  approval  is  in  such 
wise  made  the  sole  test  of  the  right  accom- 
plishment of  duty,  new  duty  called  forth 
in  new  ways,  that  it  needs  no  argument  to 
prove  the  place  of  the  Holy  Spirit  in  the 
theory  and  the  actuality  of  the  true  life  of 
men.  And  as  His  work  stands  out  evidently 
in  all  that  is  done  and  is  taught,  so  it  begins 

*  Acts  ii.  4,  xxviii.  25. 


96  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

to  be  shown  to  be  absolutely  necessary  for 
the  accomplishment  of  a  plan  which  had  been 
hidden  from  ages  and  from  generations  but 
now  had  been  made  manifest  to  God's 
saints.* 

Here,  too,  we  must  note — though  it  will 
be  impossible  to  consider  so  great  a  matter  in 
any  detail — that  the  Spirit's  work  is,  from 
the  beginning  of  the  new  dispensation,  de- 
scribed as  done  in  the  Body,  one  as  the  Spirit 
is  one,  which  is  the  Church.  In  the  new  crea- 
tion, as  in  the  old,  God  breathed  upon  that 
which  He  had  prepared  and  it  became  soul 
of  life,  and  the  Church  was  born  into  the 
vigor  of  youth  which  has  since  been  and 
rightly  is  hers.  The  Body  henceforth  lives 
because  of  the  Spirit,  and  the  Spirit  inspires 
life  and  guides  action  because  it  works  in  the 
Body.  Studying  God's  purposes  from  that 
which  He  does,  we  cannot  doubt  the  fact 
of  the  Spirit's  action  nor  yet  the  neces- 
sity that  He  shall  act.  And  this  was  rever- 
ently studied  and  assuredly  known  from  the 
beginning. 

*  Colossians  i.  2C;  Ephesians  iii.  4-6;  Acts  xv.  14  ff. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  97 

II 

The  age  of  the  Church  is,  then,  the  dis- 
pensation of  the  Spirit,  His  oinovofxia,  the 
administration  in  which  His  working  is 
especially  made  known.  However  we  may 
interpret  the  words  of  St.  John  in  his  Gos- 
pel, "  Holy  Spirit  was  not  yet,  because  not 
yet  was  Jesus  glorified,"  *  it  is  quite  certain 
that  in  the  days  which  followed  Pentecost, 
when  the  glorified  Lord  had  received  and 
sent  the  promise  of  the  Father,  Holy  Spirit 
had  become  a  living  and  working  presence 
in  the  Church.  Both  in  words  and  in  works 
the  Apostles  showed  the  power  and  proved 
the  life  of  their  Master  by  that  which  His 
Spirit  inspired.  Can  we  wonder  that  they 
expected  to  see  signs  wrought  through  Him? 
that,  realizing  that  they  had  entered  upon  a 
new  age,  they  were  looking  for  the  powers 
of  that  coming  world?  that  they  were  not 
startled  even  at  an  exuberance  of  revela- 
tions, of  spiritual  gifts,  x^^P^^^H-^^^  of  a  higher 
order  than  had  been  known  before?  or  again 
that  they  saw  wonders  where  we  of  later  days 

*  John  vii.  39. 


98  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

can  discern  but  a  normal  and  wonted  method 
of  God's  goodness  and  power?  Assuredly 
there  were  miracles  and  wonders  then;  with 
great  power  did  the  Apostles  give  witness 
of  the  resurrection  of  the  Lord  Jesus, 
faith  was  mighty,  and  its  every  exercise 
was  wonderful,  and  everything  wonderful 
was  a  proof  of  the  new  life.  We  can- 
not readily  imagine  the  conditions  of  the 
Church  in  Jerusalem,  when  the  influence  and 
perhaps  even  the  exercise  of  that  first  out- 
pouring of  the  Spirit  had  not  passed  away, 
that  day  when  pious  men  from  all  parts  of 
the  world  caught  from  otherwise  wild  utter- 
ances something  which  brought  to  their 
understanding,  as  they  said  "in  their  own 
tongues,"  the  wonderful  works  of  God. 

Soon  in  a  quieter  way  the  Apostles  taught 
the  glorified  Christ  and  the  present  Spirit  to 
the  throngs  who  gathered  in  the  great  clois- 
ters of  the  temple;  yet  those  simple  men 
were  clad  with  wonderful  dignity,  so  that 
even  their  followers  did  not  dare  to  join 
themselves  to  them,  while  the  crowd  treated 
them  with  special  honor.*     If  at  even  they 

*  Acts  ii.  11,  iv.  33,  v.  12-14. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  99 

were  put  under  guard  in  a  prison,  they  were 
found  in  the  morning  teaching  in  the  very 
place  where  they  had  been  arrested;  and 
all  the  account  they  could  give  was  that  a 
messenger  of  the  Lord  had  opened  the  doors 
and  sent  them  to  continue  the  delivery  of 
their  message.*  If  a  young  attendant  or- 
dained to  be  their  helper  was  seized  and 
charged  with  blasphemy,  he  spoke  in  his  own 
defense  with  the  keenness  and  learning  of 
a  great  scholar,  and  with  the  courage  of  a 
tried  hero  he  looked  beyond  the  present  dan- 
ger, his  face  shining  with  righteous  anger 
and  the  strength  of  truth,  until  in  the  shower 
of  stones  he  fell  asleep,  and  the  greatest 
sowing  of  the  seed  of  the  Church's  truth  was 
in  the  shedding  of  the  blood  of  that  first 
martyr.t  If  the  strongest  man  whom  the 
Sanhedrin  could  furnish,  in  learning  and 
zeal  and  hate,  was  sent  forth  against  the 
increasing  body  of  believers,  something  which 
he  saw  with  the  eyes  of  body  or  of  soul  or 
of  both,  prostrated  and  blinded  and  converted 
him.t  Thus,  in  ways  which  became  quieter 
indeed,   but  remained  mighty,   the  plans   of 

*  Acts  It.  -f  Acts  vi.,  vii.  %  Acts  ix. 


100  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

the  Apostles  were  shaped  and  guided.  Some- 
thing— some  one — told  them  where  to  go  and 
what  to  do,  whence  to  turn  away  and  from 
what  to  refrain,  some  one  quieted  their  con- 
troversies and  guided  them  with  wisdom  so 
that  they  could  say  in  the  one  formal  de- 
cision which  they  made,  "  It  seemed  good  to 
the  Holy  Spirit  and  to  us."  *  The  Spirit, 
Who  began  with  the  manifestation  of  life  and 
of  life's  freedom,  passed  on  to  show  Him- 
self the  source  of  order  and  of  discipline. 

The  Epistles  bear  a  like  testimony  as  they 
show  how  this  proof  of  the  Spirit's  presence 
was  seen,  and  how  He  held  the  balance,  if  we 
may  so  say,  between  the  excitement  of  the  be- 
ginning and  the  regularity  of  later  days. 
When  St.  Paul  wrote  to  the  Church  of  God 
at  Corinth — almost  a  contradiction  in  terms, 
as  one  has  said — it  was  to  men  filled  with 
the  unregulated  enthusiasm  of  the  conscious- 
ness of  a  new  power  working  among  them 
and  through  them;  and  we  may  well  admire 
the  judgment  and  patience  with  which  he 
quieted  them,  without  denying  the  truth  or 
the  value  of  the  strange  manifestations  of  a 

♦  Acts  XV.  28. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  101 

divine  presence  and  activity  among  them.* 
That  he  claimed  that  he  himself  had  done 
wonderful  things  at  Corinth  and  elsewhere 
is  evident;  nay,  he  even  affirmed  that  he  had 
a  greater  power  of  speaking  with  tongues 
than  all  the  rest.t  But  his  plea  is  for  order; 
and  it  is  noticeable,  by  the  way,  that  he  cen- 
tres it  on  the  fact  that  God  had  set  some  in 
station  and  governance  in  the  Church,  that 
confusion  might  be  avoided  and  that  peace 
might  ensue. t  Pass  to  the  Epistle  to  the 
Ephesians,  and  you  will  see  how  in  the  city 
in  which  the  Apostle's  presence  not  many 
years  before  had  excited  a  riot,  there  was  a 
hearing  for  a  quiet  but  profound  study  of 
the  work  of  God's  Spirit,  and  note  again  that 
the  centre  of  quiet  and  unity  is  the  order  of 
the  Church's  administration. §  It  all  seems 
to  us  a  strange  world,  that  in  which  Chris- 
tians lived  then,  in  which  those  early  prob- 
lems were  met  and  for  all  needed  intents 
solved;  but  it  was  a  world  in  which  the  Spirit 
of  God  made  Himself  known.     Believers  in 

*  I.  Corinthians  xii.,  xiv. 

1 1.  Corinthians  xiv.  18;  II.  Corinthians  xii.  12. 

1 1.  Corinthians  xii.  28-31.  §  Ephesians  iv. 


lOa  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

God  when  they  came  to  believe  also  in  Jesus 
Christ  His  Son  knew  and  felt  and  used  the 
power  of  His  Holy  Spirit.  They  evidently 
had  faith  in  the  Spirit,  and  they  must  have 
felt  that  their  faith  in  God  was  not  complete 
without  the  recognition  of  His  Spirit;  but 
of  this  faith  we  find  as  yet  no  clear  confession. 

in 

In  the  light  of  what  we  have  thus  far 
gathered  from  the  New  Testament,  we  may 
certainly  say  that  the  faith  of  the  early 
Christians  came  from  the  Holy  Spirit  and 
that  they  had  faith  in  Him. 

1.  Their  faith  was  a  gift  of  the  Spirit — 
not  their  faith  in  Him  alone,  but  all  their 
faith,  their  trust  in  God,  their  allegiance  to 
Him,  their  knowledge  of  Him  and  of  the 
world  unseen.  It  startles  us  a  little  to  see 
how  St.  Paul,  in  a  passage  to  which  reference 
has  just  been  made,  enumerates  the  gifts — the 
xcxplafxara — of  the  Spirit.*  He  is  trying  to 
quiet  a  controversy  which  centred  on  the 
question  whether  prophecy  or  speaking  with 
tongues   was    the   greater   and   more    useful 

*  I.  Corinthians  xii.  1  ff. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  103 

gift;  whether,  to  use  words  of  a  modern 
meaning,  preaching  with  a  view  to  instruction 
and  edification,  or  ecstatic  utterance  witness- 
ing to  special  inspiration  and  fitted  to  attract 
attention,  was  worth  the  more  in  the  Church. 
His  first  answer  is  in  brief,  that  all  gifts  are 
valuable  because  they  come  from  the  Holy 
Spirit,  and  that  we  cannot  say  that  in  itself 
any  one  is  better  than  another,  because  they 
all  have  the  same  source.  But  see  how  he 
proceeds  to  enumerate  them.  "  To  one,"  says 
he,  "  is  given  through  the  Spirit  a  word  of 
wisdom;  to  another,  a  word  of  knowledge  ac- 
cording to  the  same  Spirit;  to  one  of  different 
kind,  faith  in  the  same  Spirit;  and  to  another 
gifts  of  healings,  in  the  one  Spirit " ;  and 
then  he  passes  on  to  other  gifts  somewhat 
resembling  healings,  all  having  what  we  might 
call  a  distinctly  miraculous  character.  The 
order  and  the  stress  are  certainly  remarkable. 
First  are  named  wisdom  and  knowledge,  two 
great  and  fundamental  gifts  which  ought  not 
to  have  escaped  the  minds  of  the  contestants; 
each  side  would  probably  assert  that  it  had 
both,  and  neither  would  claim  knowledge 
for  itself  and  leave   wisdom   for  the   other. 


104  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

But  before  any  other  gift  or  manifestation 
of  the  Spirit  the  Apostle  puts  faith.  It  is 
as  if  he  said:  You  contend  about  things  which 
are  in  themselves  but  externals;  you  have 
forgotten  the  weightier  matters  which  are 
within  and  give  value  to  the  rest;  the  Spirit 
is  the  source  of  wisdom,  the  apprehension  of 
reality  and  of  knowledge,  the  recognition  of 
facts;  and  what  is  real  and  what  is  true  can 
be  known  only  by  a  power  of  insight  which 
belongs  to  those  who  trust  in  God  and  be- 
lieve Him;  and  this  trust  and  belief  are  dis- 
tinctly the  work  of  God's  Spirit.  Thus  he 
reminded  them  of  the  place  of  faith  as  being 
preliminary  to  such  gifts  as  miracles  or 
speaking  with  tongues  or  even  prophecy,  and 
of  the  great  truth  that  faith  is  the  Spirit's 
gift. 

But  go  back  a  little  and  read  how  St.  Paul 
proposed  a  test  of  so-called  spiritual  gifts, 
and  on  what  he  makes  the  question  of  their 
reality  to  depend.*  It  is  the  same  test,  we 
may  note,  as  that  which  St.  John  furnishes 
when  he  charges  his  disciples  that  they  should 
not   believe   every   spirit   but   try  the   spirits 

*  I.  Corinthians  xii.  3. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  105 

whether  they  are  of  God,  and  try  them  by 
their  acknowledgment  or  denial  that  Jesus 
Christ  is  come  in  the  flesh.*  Even  so  St. 
Paul,  beginning  to  write  as  to  spiritual  things, 
tells  his  disciples  that  no  one  when  he  is 
speaking  in  God's  Spirit  saith,  "  Accursed  is 
Jesus,"  and  that  no  one  can  say  "  Lord 
Jesus  "  except  in  Holy  Spirit.  And  having 
made  this  assertion  so  emphatically,  he  passes 
on  to  speak  of  the  differences  of  gifts,  of 
ministrations,  of  workings,  while  there  is  but 
one  Spirit,  one  Lord,  and  one  God.  The 
essential  things,  he  argues,  that  in  which  all 
xapifffxara  or  gifts  of  grace  must  agree,  be- 
cause it  is  a  prerequisite  to  them  all,  is  the 
profession  of  belief  in  Jesus  Christ  as  the 
Lord  of  souls,  as  the  Lord  of  each  one  to 
whom  in  any  way  the  Spirit  comes  or  can 
come.  And  still  more  emphatically,  if  pos- 
sible, he  declares  that  for  this  profession  so 
simple  in  words,  so  simple  because  so  funda- 
mental in  the  heart's  conviction,  there  is 
needed  the  power  of  the  Holy  Spirit.  It  is 
in  reality  no  little  thing,  simple  though  its 
form  and  utterance  may  be,   that  any  man 

♦I.  John  iv.  1-3. 


106  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

can  make  the  great  confession,  Jesus  is  Lord. 
For  it  speaks  of  faith  in  its  every  sense,  trust 
and  allegiance  and  knowledge,  and  the  Spirit 
is  thus  declared  the  Spirit  of  faith. 

2.  With  this  recognition  of  the  Holy 
Spirit  as  distinctively  the  Spirit  of  faith,  we 
also  read  in  the  New  Testament  the  proof 
that  the  Christians  of  early  times  had  faith 
in  the  Spirit.  They  knew  Him — or  rather 
they  came  to  know  Him — as  a  person,  and 
they  wrote  of  Him  as  a  person,  even  when 
so  to  write  involved  a  solecism.  "  When 
He,  the  Spirit  of  truth,  is  come,"  *  so  St. 
John  records  the  Lord's  words,  using  the 
masculine  pronoun  though  the  word  for 
*  spirit '  is  grammatically  of  neuter  gender, 
€H6ivo?  TO  Ttrev/xa,  "  He  the  Spirit,"  and  he 
passes  on  to  describe  His  work  as  that  of  a 
person:  "He  shall  lead  you  along  the  way 
in  (or  into)  the  whole  range  of  truth."  In 
like  manner  we  read,  naturally  but  emphatic- 
ally, in  the  Acts  and  in  the  Epistles;  He 
speaks.  He  bears  witness.  He  stands  in  a 
personal  relation  to  those  who  believe  in  Him 
and  through  Him  in  God;  He  is  the  source 

*  John  xvi.  13. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  107 

of  truth,  of  life,  of  order;  He  effects  the 
presence  of  the  Father  and  the  Son  with 
men;  He  is  the  life  of  the  Church;  He 
maketh  intercession  for  us;  He  searcheth  out 
the  depths  of  God;  in  His  sevenfold  glory 
and  power  He  stands  before  the  throne  in 
heaven;  and  with  the  Church  He  calls  to 
the  Lord  to  come  for  the  completion  of  His 
work.* 

All  this  is  a  witness  to  the  disciples' 
faith  in  Him;  and  therewithal  it  is  a  wit- 
ness to  His  widely  extended  influence;  for 
He  in  Whom  men  could  believe  was  work- 
ing mightily  in  men.  It  was  to  impart  Him 
that  Apostles  laid  hands  upon  those  who  had 
been  baptized  into  the  name  of  the  Lord 
Jesus  or  into  that  triune  name  in  which  the 
Son  and  the  Spirit  were  united  with  the 
eternal  Father  as  one  God;  and  witness  was 
borne  to  His  coming  and  His  abiding,  now 
by  signs  and  wonders,  now  by  the  sacra- 
ments and  ordinances  of  the  Church,  and 
now  by  their  quiet  fruits  as  shown  in  love 
and  longsuffering  and  fidelity.  Surely  in 
those   early   days   it  was   reasonable,   it   was 

*  Revelation  i.  4,  xxii.  14. 


108  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

necessary,  that  those  who  accepted  God  as 
revealed  in  and  by  Christ  should  believe  the 
Spirit,  should  believe  in  Him,  should  ac- 
knowledge that  all  the  life  of  their  soul  was 
His;  the  Spirit  ever  bore  witness  with  their 
spirit  that  they  were  God's  sons,  and  this 
witness  was  the  mighty  energy  of  their  lives. 

IV 

In  contrast  with  this,  faith  in  the  Spirit  as 
felt  and  confessed  in  earliest  days  and  knowl- 
edge of  the  Spirit  as  the  only  source  of 
the  soul's  life,  we  find  that  in  the  declara- 
tion and  definition  of  what  came  to  be  known 
as  the  Faith  there  is  but  little  said  at  the 
first  as  to  the  Holy  Spirit's  place  in  the 
oeconomy  of  salvation.  More  than  once  in- 
deed, as  we  have  seen.  He  is  named  with 
the  Father  and  the  Son  in  such  wise  as  to 
show  that  together  with  them  He  was  wor- 
shipped and  glorified,  but  in  the  earliest 
creeds,  which  made  confession  of  the  Son's 
relation  to  the  Father  and  to  us — "  God's 
only  Son,  our  Lord," — we  find  no  more  said 
of  the  Holy  Spirit  than  the  simple  declara- 
tion of  faith  in  Him.     And  if  presently  in 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  109 

the  West  we  find  the  confession  of  the  Holy 
Church  or  of  forgiveness  of  sins  in  the  Holy 
Church,  it  is  (I  venture  to  think)  more  as 
making  a  fourth  division  of  the  creed  than 
as  adding  to  it  a  statement  of  the  method 
of  the  Spirit's  working.  Doubtless  the 
thought  was  then,  that  in  the  Church  the 
Spirit  dwells  and  is  made  known  and  that 
His  presence  brings  forgiveness  and  expels 
sin,  but  it  would  seem  that  the  West  was 
content  for  a  while  to  say  of  Him  as  did  the 
East,  "  And  in  the  Holy  Spirit." 

This,  if  we  may  trust  our  records,  was 
all  that  even  the  Fathers  at  Nicsea  thought 
it  needful  to  say  of  the  Spirit  when  they 
simplified  and  guarded  the  words  of  their 
former  confession  as  to  the  Son  of  God, 
Jesus  Christ  our  Lord.  We  so  wonder  at 
the  baldness  and  abruptness  of  the  third 
part  of  their  notable  Creed,  that  possibly 
we  may  be  allowed  to  wonder  if  they  did  not 
mean  to  imply  that  it  was  unnecessary  to 
modify  the  form  in  which  the  former  creeds 
had  closed.  It  would  not  be  quite  correct 
to  say  that  when  the  council  of  Nicsea  assem- 
bled there  had  been  no  controversy  as  to  the 


110  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

Holy  Spirit;  but  certainly  there  had  been 
no  serious  questioning  as  to  the  Spirit  which 
was  not  involved  in  the  discussions  as  to  the 
Son;  and  it  mav  be  that  the  council,  know- 
ing  that  the  faith  of  the  earlier  days  was 
still  held  in  this  regard,  while  framing  a  form 
of  words  which  should  be  used  everywhere 
when  men  spoke  of  the  Son,  left  it  to  each 
"  particular "  Church  to  speak  of  the  Spirit 
as  it  was  wont  or  as  it  judged  needful. 
Scholars  are  generally  in  agreement  now  that 
the  addition  to  the  creed  of  Nicsea  affirmed 
at  Chalcedon  came  not  from  Constantinople 
but  from  Jerusalem,  mother  and  mistress  of 
all  the  churches.  Thus  we  seem  to  hear  from 
the  lips  of  the  catechist-bishop  of  the  mother- 
city  what  he  taught  concerning  the  Spirit, 
that  He  was  Lord  and  Lifegiver,  that  His 
procession  was  from  the  Father  Who  alone  is 
avro^eoiy  that  with  Father  and  Son  He  was 
to  be  honored  and  glorified,  that  He  was 
revealed  in  the  earlier  days  as  the  prophets 
spoke  by  His  inspiration.  And,  after  the 
few  words  of  the  West  which  remained 
unamplified  and  after  the  expanded  formula 
of   the   East,   both   branches   of   the    Church 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  111 

were  guided  to  add,  as  to  the  Spirit's  work- 
ing, articles  which  speak  of  the  Church,  of 
the  restoration  which  is  affected  in  it  by  for- 
giveness, and  of  that  which  remains  for  man 
redeemed  and  forgiven  and  sanctified — resur- 
rection of  the  flesh  and  the  hfe  of  a  coming 
age.  They  passed  from  the  Spirit,  only  men- 
tioned or  mentioned  with  a  declaration  of 
His  relation  to  men  and  to  the  Father,  to  tell 
of  His  great  works  as  objects  of  faith  for 
this  world  and  the  next.  Faith  in  the  Spirit 
both  preceded  and  extended  far  beyond  the 
Faith  in  which  men  spoke  of  Him,  even  as 
they  were  guided  by  Him  to  believe  and  to 
make  confession. 

We  may  see  a  reason  for  this  when  we 
consider  that,  while  we  believe  the  Holy 
Spirit  and  believe  in  Him,  He  is  not  as  yet 
fully  revealed;  the  revelation  of  Him  is  still 
in  the  making,  especially  as  His  manifoldly 
variegated  work  *  is  shown  in  the  complicated 
history  of  the  Church  and  in  His  conflict  for 
righteousness  under  the  most  adverse  condi- 
tions. It  has  been  said  that  the  Church  of 
England  is  lamentably  deficient  in  works  on 

*  noTitmo'iKcTioc  may  be  applied  here  as  in  Ephesians  i.  10. 


lia  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

the  theology  of  the  Spirit,  there  being  until 
lately  almost  no  work  of  value  on  this  great 
subject  later  than  Bishop  Heber's  Bampton 
Lectures.*  The  reproach,  if  it  should  be  so 
called,  has  been  in  part  removed  by  Professor 
Swete's  scholarly  and  devout  work  in  which, 
by  way  of  prolegomena,  he  had  examined  and 
commented  on  every  passage  in  the  New 
Testament  in  which  the  Spirit  is  mentioned, 
and  which  he  has  followed  by  another  volume 
on  the  teaching  of  the  early  Church  on  this 
matter.t  But  really  the  Church,  as  these 
volumes  show,  was  not  ready  at  the  first,  and 
it  is  not  ready  now,  to  state  definitely  all 
that  she  would  wish  to  state  as  to  the  third 
Person  of  the  Trinity  and  His  work  in  the 
oeconomy  of  this  dispensation.  Men  in  patri- 
archal and  prophetic  days  came  to  know 
God,  and  then  the  Son  revealed  Him  and 
He  was  confessed  as  Father;  in  the  Incarna- 
tion men  learned  to  know  the  Son  Who 
taught  the  theology  of  the  Father,  and  then 
the  Spirit  revealed  Him  as  Jesus  Christ  and 

*  The   Personality   and   Office   of   the    Christian   Comforter, 
1835. 

f  The  Holy  Spirit  in  the  Old  Testament ;  The  Holy  Spirit  in 

the  Early  Church. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  113 

giiided  the  phraseology  of  the  Church  as 
she  learned  how  He  might  be  rightly  con- 
fessed; now  we  are  coming  to  know  the 
Spirit,  and  we  may  be  bidden  to  look  for- 
ward to  a  time  when,  as  to  the  theological 
confession,  "  God  shall  reveal  even  this " 
unto  us.*  It  is  not  the  English  Church 
alone  which  cannot  yet  in  complete  form 
of  words  confess  the  Spirit;  the  great  historic 
Churches  of  East  and  West  do  not  agree  as 
to  the  form  of  words  in  which  they  may 
rightly  state  His  relation  to  the  Father  and 
the  Son;  devout  and  wise  scholars  are  sure 
that  in  faith  they  agree,  and  we  cannot  lay 
too  great  stress  on  this;  but  the  one  declares 
that  it  can  say  no  more  than  that  He  pro- 
ceedeth  from  the  Father  and  the  other  does 
not  dare  to  say  less  than  that  He  proceedeth 
from  the  Father  and  the  Son;  while  neither 
can  tell  us  clearly  what  is  meant  by  *  pro- 
ceedeth,' though  both  agree  in  the  second 
part  of  the  Creed  as  to  the  meaning,  or  at 
least  the  symbolism,  of  '  begotten.'     It  would 

*  See  especially  at  the  end  of  Professor  Scott's  article  on 
The  Trinity  in  the  additional  (fifth)  volume  of  Hastings's 
Dictionary  of  the  Bible,  to  the  opening  words  of  which  refer- 
ence has  been  made  on  an  earlier  page. 


114  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

seem  that  for  a  long  time  yet — at  least  until 
some  great  change  shall  come — our  theology- 
must  wait  in  this  matter  upon  faith.* 

And  even  as  to  this,  is  our  faith  in  the 
Spirit  of  God  as  well  defined  and  as  strong 
as  is  our  faith  in  the  Father  and  the  Son? 
Doubtless,  whence  we  force  our  minds  to 
think  and  our  hearts  to  worship,  we  make  no 
distinction,  but  say  the  third  phrase  of  our 
Gloria  with  the  same  earnestness  and  sense 
of  reality  and  devotion  as  its  opening  words; 
but  we  do  not  quite  readily  think  of  the 
Spirit  as  a  person,  a  person  with  Whom  we 
have  relations,  a  person  Whom  we  love  and 
in  Whom  we  can  confide  and  to  Whom  we 
go  for  comfort  and  grace;  we  need  to  watch 
ourselves  lest  in  speaking  or  writing  of  Him 
we  say  *  it,'  as  if  His  personality  were  but 
a  figure  of  rhetoric;  we  are  not  readily  con- 
scious of  His  presence  and  of  its  effect  on 
ourselves.  Our  faith  is  real,  it  is  sure;  but 
it  has  not  gained  its  full  strength,  and  it 
has  not  led  to  as  full  knowledge  as  we  feel 

*  So  also  as  to  the  theology  and  the  practice  of  Confirmation, 
the  Churches  of  the  East  and  of  the  West  are  not  in  agreement; 
and  there  is  no  consent  as  to  the  'grace*  which  it  confers. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  115 

we  need.  As  the  confession  of  the  Son  could 
not  be  made  in  clear  words  until  those  who 
believed  in  Him  had  challenged  their  faith 
and  contended  for  it,  so  the  confession  of 
the  Spirit  calls  for  a  stronger  and  more 
searchingly  tried  faith  than  we  now  have. 
When  with  the  heart  the  Church  steadfastly 
believes  in  Him  unto  righteousness,  then  with 
the  mouth  will  she  be  able  to  make  full 
confession  of  Him  unto  salvation. 


Here  we  have,  then,  a  striking  and  most 
important  example  of  the  Faith,  in  our  tech- 
nical use  of  the  word,  waiting  for  faith  and 
manifestation.  Thus  it  has  been  or  is  with 
all  truth,  for  practically  all  is  reached  and 
acquired  and  acknowledged  in  the  same  way. 
Thus,  as  the  centuries  have  passed  on,  men 
have  believed  and  had  faith  in  God,  have 
come  to  know  Him  and  have  declared  their 
faith  and  their  knowledge  in  their  Creed. 
Thus,  having  their  faith  directed  towards  the 
Son  of  God,  they  welcomed  Him  and  knew 
Him  and  saw  in  what  terms  they  might  sing 
His  greatness  and   His  love.     And  in  like 


116  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

manner,  we  who  live  in  the  age  in  which  the 
manifestation  of  the  Spirit  is  taking  place, 
can  trace  somewhat  of  the  progress  of  our 
faith  to  knowledge  and  thence  to  boldness 
of  utterance,  the  plainness  of  speech,*  which 
elect  souls  shall  first  attain  and  which  they 
shall  teach  the  Church.  That  expression  of 
faith,  not  fully  declared  in  the  form  of 
creed,  is  yet  seen  in  the  words  as  to  progress 
in  sanctification  and  towards  salvation  which 
have  been  added  to  the  declaration  that  we 
believe  in  the  Holy  Spirit.  As  we  accept 
and  use  the  Church,  the  Scriptures,  and  the 
Sacraments,  we  show  that  we  do  really  be- 
lieve in  the  Holy  Spirit,  Who  is  the  Church's 
life.  Who  speaks  in  the  Scriptures,  Whose 
power  is  operative  in  the  Sacraments.  As 
we  find  forgiveness  and  grow  in  grace  and 
in  the  knowledge  of  the  Lord  and  Saviour 
Jesus  Christ,  we  are  conscious  that  the 
Spirit's  holiness  and  power  are  becoming 
effective  in  us;  and  in  our  lives  there  is  at 
least  the  beginning  of  a  revelation  of  Him, 
as  we  find  them  quickened  with  new  energy, 
endowed  with  new  freedom,  directed  in  the 

*  nappriola,  Acts  iv.  31;  II.  Corinthians  iii.  12;  etc. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  117 

way  of  right,  supported  in  dangers,  carried 
through  temptations,  prepared  to  know  Him 
better,  that  "  we  may  with  steadfast  faith 
ever  acknowledge  "  Him, 

"  The  Spirit  of  Father  and  of  Son, 
One  God  in  Persons  Three." 


Thus  we  may  learn  that  our  faith,  our  sure 
confidence,  our  strong  allegiance,  may  grow 
even  as  our  knowledge  grows;  and  that  there 
should  be  for  us  a  daily  increase  in  all  the 
gifts  of  the  Spirit,  wisdom  and  understand- 
ing, counsel  and  ghostly  strength,  knowledge 
and  true  godliness,  and — crowning  all  the  rest 
and  binding  them  together — the  holy  fear 
of  God.  And  thus  we  shall  do  somewhat 
towards  preparing  the  Church,  in  words  of 
Catholic  truth  and  devotion,  to  make  a  full 
declaration  of  faith,  the  Catholic  Faith  as  to 
the  eternal  and  blessed  Spirit  Whom  she 
ever  worships  and  Whose  divine  power  she 
constantly  invokes. 


LECTURE  V 

THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH 

Galatians  ii.  20. 

"0  6e  vvv  ^0)  ev  niaTei  i^o). 
**  And  what  I  now  live,  I  live  in  faith." 

We  have  been  engaged  in  a  study  of  faith 
and  of  its  relation  to  the  confession  of  faith 
which  is  made  by  the  Christian  Church  in  the 
recital  of  the  Creed.  And  in  particular  we 
have  considered  the  fundamental  truths  of 
faith,  belief  in  God,  belief  in  Jesus  Christ, 
and  belief  in  the  Holy  Spirit,  as  presented 
to  our  souls  and  as  leading  to  confession  by 
our  lips.  Faith  as  personal  allegiance  and 
faith  as  a  source  of  knowledge  we  have  seen 
combining  to  increase  the  depth  and  the 
extent  of  our  apprehension  of  the  realities 
of  the  divine  nature,  of  the  truth  of  the  Son 
of  God  incarnate  in  human  nature,  and  of 
the  Spirit  of  God  as  dwelling  in  the  souls 
of  men.     In  these  examples,  which  may  well 

118 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  119 

suggest  others,  we  see  both  hfe  and  the  reve- 
lation of  truth  growing  out  of  faith,  and 
faith  leading  up  to  confession  and  guiding 
it,  even  if  it  cannot  be  fully  expressed  by  it. 
For  faith  demands  life,  and  is  a  condition  of 
life,  and  leads  to  life  given  and  growing  more 
abundantly.  Our  special  topic,  then,  to-day 
is  the  Christian's  Life  of  Faith. 


If  we  go  back  to  our  definitions,  or  rather 
to  the  New  Testament  statements  in  regard 
to  faith,  we  can  see  that  each  tells  us  some- 
what of  the  nature  of  the  true  life  of  the 
soul.  The  truthfulness  and  trustworthiness 
and  allegiance  of  man  to  God-ward,  what 
are  they  but  the  working  of  a  life,  real  and 
moral,  freely  acting  yet  recognizing  depend- 
ence and  duty?  Each  in  varied  aspect  tells 
of  a  relationship,  necessary  yet  gladly  ac- 
knowledged, between  us  and  the  heavenly 
Father.  To  trust  Him,  to  respond  to  His 
trust  in  us,  to  surrender  ourselves  to  Him — 
and  all  this  is  involved  in  the  simplest 
thought  of  faith — is  to  live  a  life  of  simple 
yet  strong  relation  to  Him  Who  thus  calls 


120  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

out  our  faith  and  therewith  quickens  our 
belief:  "He  that  believeth  hath  life.''  Re- 
call the  definition  with  which  the  writer 
to  the  Hebrews  introduces  the  record  of 
some  of  the  great  heroes  of  faith:  you  will 
see  that  that  which  gives  reality  to  hope  and 
proves  things  not  seen  must  be  a  power  to 
influence  life.*  And  as  you  read  on  you 
will  find  the  effects  of  this  faith  shown  in 
life.  It  led  one  of  the  men  of  oldest  time 
to  offer  worship,  and  another  to  build  an 
ark;  one  to  exchange  his  home  for  a  place 
of  sojourn  in  a  strange  land,  and  another 
to  do  such  quiet  duty  that  all  we  need 
know  of  him  is  that  He  pleased  God.  It 
inspired  some  to  die  in  hope  of  a  coming 
deliverance,  and  one  specially  chosen  as  a 
leader  to  do  his  varied  work  as  seeing  Him 
Who  is  invisible.  And  in  the  days  of  judges 
and  prophets  and  Maccabees  it  made  men 
and  women  brave  to  suffer  and  to  do,  to 
become  such  that  the  world  was  not  worthy 
of  them,  and  to  die  without  complaining 
that  they  had  not  yet  received  the  promise. 
All  this  has  to  do,  indeed,  with  the  external, 

*  Hebrews  xi. 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  121 

but  in  its  every  item  it  witnesses  to  char- 
acter; if  these  men  and  women  had  not  lived 
in  faith,  it  could  not  have  been  written  that 
in  faith  they  died.  Pass  on  to  St.  John's 
writings  in  Gospel  and  Epistle  and  Apoc- 
alypse; and,  as  we  have  seen  already,  faith 
is  there  identified  with  life  and  life  with 
faith.  To  believe,  he  tells  us  both  when 
he  is  reporting  the  Lord's  sayings  and  when 
he  is  speaking  from  his  own  experience,  is 
to  have  the  true  strong  victorious  life  of  the 
soul;  nay,  the  victory  that  overcometh  the 
world  is  our  faith.  And  in  his  words  as 
to  the  great  assurances,  he  says;  "  These 
things  I  write  to  you  that  ye  may  know  that 
ye  have  eternal  life,  to  you  who  are  believers 
on  the  Name  of  the  Son  of  God."  "The 
Son  of  God  hath  given  us  discernment  of 
mind  to  know  the  Very  One,  and  we  are  in 
the  Very  One,  in  His  Son  Jesus  Christ.  He 
is  the  Very  God  and  life  eternal."  * 

Look  at  the  argumentative  words  in  which 
St.  Paul  deals  with  faith  as  opposed  to 
works,  with  the  justification  which  God 
freely  gives  as  opposed  to  the  righteousness 

*  John  iii.  36,  vi.  40;  I.  John  v.  4,  5,  13,  20. 


ISa  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

which  is  by  the  law,  and  you  will  find 
him  closely  connecting  the  life  of  the  soul 
with  faith:  "  I  through  law  once  died  to 
law,  that  I  may  live  to  God;  I  have  been 
crucified  with  Christ,  and  I  am  living  no 
longer  myself  but  there  is  living  in  me 
Christ;  and  what  I  now  am  living  in  flesh, 
in  faith  I  am  living — the  faith  of  the  Son  of 
God,  of  Him  Who  loved  me  and  gave  Him- 
self up  for  me."  *  The  depth  of  these  and 
such  like  words  no  man  can  sound;  their 
truth  is  certified  by  the  experience  of  our 
own  souls  in  their  progress  in  that  which  is 
distinctively  their  life. 

Verily  our  life  is  life  of  faith;  faith  is  its 
principle,  faith  its  test,  faith  its  goal,  faith — 
may  we  not  say? — its  reward. 

II 

But  let  us  trace  out  the  steps  of  the  life 
of  the  child  of  God,  and  see  how  from  its 
simple  beginning  to  its  full  completion  they 
are  all  guided  by  faith,  they  are  all  acts  of 
faith.  This  is  true,  whether  that  life  is  con- 
sidered  as    God's    gift    growing    under    His 

•  Galatians  ii.  19,  20. 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  123 

care,  or  as  lived  by  man  under  circumstances 
which  he  has  it  in  his   power  to  control. 

It  is  certainly  God's  gift.  It  has  its  be- 
ginning from  Him  and  He  is  its  source  and 
origin.  Why  the  life  of  the  Almighty  and 
self-sufficing  God  should  flow  forth,  pro- 
ducing a  creation  and  continuing  that  crea- 
tion in  existence,  we  cannot  tell;  why  He 
should  desire  the  existence  of  something 
which  should  appear  to  be  beyond  Himself, 
the  mind  is  baffled  at  any  attempt  to  explain; 
why  He  should  call  into  existence,  by  pro- 
cesses of  long  continuance  and  by  an  evolu- 
tion not  always  uniform  in  operation,  rational 
beings  with  the  power  of  refusing  obedience 
to  His  will,  is  the  puzzle  of  the  universe. 
Again,  we  know  but  in  part  the  method  of 
His  action,  and  of  its  principles  our  mind 
and  our  soul  cannot  take  cognizance;  how 
God  created  we  do  not  know,  and  how  at 
the  last  He  gave  man  an  existence  seemingly 
so  independent  of  His  own  we  do  not  know. 
It  is  now,  as  it  was  near  the  beginning  of 
this  dispensation:  "By  faith  we  apprehend 
that  the  ages  were  fashioned  by  an  utterance 
of   God,   with   the  result   that   what  is   seen 


124  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

hath  not  come  into  existence  out  of  things 
phenomenal,  things  that  are  appearing."  * 
And  true  though  it  is  that  the  study  of 
God's  work,  in  that  to  which  it  has  already 
reached  and  that  to  which  it  is  evidently  tend- 
ing, does  justify  His  ways  by  what  we  are 
sure  will  be  a  righteous  theodicy,  both  the  dis- 
covery of  the  largely  unproved  purpose  and 
the  vision  of  the  final  result  are  great  acts 
of  faith,  and  that  too  of  faith  which  has 
been  exercised  and  trained  for  deep  under- 
standing and  lofty  ventures.  Faith,  accept- 
ing the  fact  and  having  little  knowledge  of 
the  efficient  and  the  final  cause,  is  yet  bold 
to  say  that  the  Creator  will  at  the  last  be 
justified  for  the  most  awful  act  of  omnipo- 
tence, the  creation  of  a  rational  being  en- 
dowed with  free  will,  and  in  the  result  of 
that  system  of  training  through  temptation 
and  choice  and  growth  of  character — the  at- 
tainment of  character  by  the  use  of  discipline 
— which  shall  prove  itself  worthy  of  God  and 
of  man. 

But  I  think  that  when  we  speak  of  the 
life  of  the  soul  we  have   specially  in  mind 

•  Hebrews  xi.  3. 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  125 

that  life  which  is  in  its  operation  the  process 
of  salvation  and  of  which  the  New  Testa- 
ment speaks  so  earnestly  and  constantly. 
This,  which  is  really  God  living  in  man,  and 
so  far  from  limiting  his  personality  really 
calling  it  out  and  building  it  up,  is  in  its 
every  step  from  God,  known,  apprehended, 
put  into  operation,  and  kept  in  operation 
by  faith.  Its  first  action  is  from  God's  call- 
ing; its  first  formal  act  is  God's  regeneration, 
the  implanting  in  us  of  the  germ  of  the 
spiritual,  which  is  equivalent  to  the  begin- 
ning of  a  personal  relation  to  God;  its  con- 
stant supply  is  seen  in  the  guidance  of  the 
Holy  Spirit,  the  acceptance  and  use  of  which 
means  constant  progress;  its  reward  is  God's 
gift,  suited  to  His  call.  His  regeneration. 
His  guidance,  which  could  come  indeed  from 
naught  else,  and  by  necessity  comes  thence 
to  those  who  receive  it.  Each  step  as  we 
thus  trace  the  life  in  its  aspect  God-ward 
appeals  to  faith,  to  faith  as  an  element  of 
character  and  faith  as  an  act  of  knowledge, 
to  the  tender  of  allegiance  and  the  acceptance 
of  knowledge  of  the  unseen. 

When  viewed  from  the  man-ward  side,  the 


126  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

Christian  life  is  marked  at  the  first  by  ac- 
ceptance of  the  calHng,  then  more  definitely 
by  conversion  which  is  the  normal  concomi- 
tant of  regeneration,  passing  on  to  the  ex- 
tended process  of  sanctification  under  God's 
guidance,  and  having  for  its  issue  victory 
which  as  coming  from  God  is  our  reward. 
As  to  most  of  us  God's  call  comes  quietly, 
so  early  indeed  that  we  carry  no  distinct 
memory  of  it,  and  few  of  us  know  more 
of  our  acceptance  of  the  call  than  that  we 
must  have  tendered  it  when  our  souls  first 
grasped  the  thought  that  we  stood  in  some 
relation  to  God,  that  God  was  a  reality  to 
us.  It  was  faith  in  its  germ,  but  true  faith, 
which  made  the  response  then;  those  with 
whom  still  dwells  the  consciousness  of  the 
call  can  testify  to  the  reality  of  the  response 
which  they  gave,  and  gave  through  faith 
and  in  the  operation  of  its  power.  Conver- 
sion, hard  (especially  for  us  Churchmen)  to 
define  because  of  the  inaccurate  and  perverse 
definitions  which  have  been  given  to  the 
word — conversion,  which  at  least  involves  the 
conscious  recognition  of  a  relation  to  God, 
what  it  is  and  what  it  ought  to  be,  and  the 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  127 

determination  to  make  it  what  it  ought  to 
be,  the  resolution  of  man,  knowing  his  sin- 
fulness and  his  weakness,  to  seek  pardon 
from  Him  Who  alone  can  forgive  and 
strength  from  Him  without  Whom  nothing 
is  strong;  conversion,  impossible  in  its  Chris- 
tian sense  without  regeneration,  and  abso- 
lutely necessary  that  regeneration  may  lead 
to  any  result;  conversion,  dependent  alto- 
gether we  are  sure  upon  God's  grace,  and 
yet  our  act  as  by  God's  grace  inspired — 
this  is  the  work  of  faith,  recognizing  duty, 
proffering  allegiance,  grasping  realities,  de- 
termined to  do  and  to  suffer  for  the  truth's 
sake.  Sanctification,  the  daily  increase  in 
God's  Holy  Spirit  under  the  guidance  of 
that  Spirit  more  and  more,  the  advance  into 
and  in  holiness,  the  progressive  cleansing  and 
strengthening  of  the  character,  its  greater 
value  and  its  greater  usefulness,  its  widening 
knowledge  and  its  deepening  religion,  in  all 
dependent  and  acknowledging  that  it  is  de- 
pendent upon  the  Divine  guidance — this  is 
the  work  of  faith  and  comes  from  what  faith 
is  and  what  faith  can  do.  And  what  we 
call    the    victory,    as    it    comes    from    man's 


128  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

fidelity,  and  the  reward,  as  it  comes  from 
God's  truth,  this  is — to  use  again  St.  John's 
bold  words — our  faith,  in  that  it  triumphs 
over  the  world  and  all  that  is  worldly,  all 
that  is  transitory  because  it  is  temporal  and 
thus  out  of  the  range  of  faith;  may  it  not 
be  quite  as  literally  that  the  reward  shall  be 
greater  visions  of  the  unseen,  greater  power 
to  do  the  impossible,  greater  inspiration  for 
worship  and  for  service? 

The  true  life  of  the  Christian — to  it  we 
come  by  faith,  into  it  we  are  born  by  faith, 
in  it  by  faith  we  make  progress,  its  victorious 
and  perfect  issue  is  faith.  Our  life  hath  been 
hidden  and  remains  hidden,  as  Christ  is 
hidden,  in  God ;  *  and  this  certainly  means 
that  only  by  the  loftiest  and  mightiest  opera- 
tions of  faith  is  it  felt  and  known,  used  and 
strengthened  and  perfected.  There  is  no 
true  life  in  man  which  is  not  the  life  of 
faith. 

Ill 

I  fear  lest  I  may  seem  to  detract  from 
the  reality  or  the  spirituality  of  the  life  of 

*  Colossians  iii.  3,  4. 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  129 

faith  when  I  affirm  that  it  is  rightly  de- 
scribed as  the  sacramental  life.  The  word 
'  sacramental '  may  seem  to  mean  either  cere- 
monial as  some  understand  it  or  figurative 
as  it  presents  itself  to  others;  and  certainly 
the  life  of  faith  is  not  a  life  of  external 
observances  or  unreality.  It  must  indeed 
have  an  expression  in  acts,  and  those  acts 
will  be  largely  acts  of  worship;  it  must  also 
be  confessed  as  beyond  the  power  of  expres- 
sion, and  therefore  the  words  in  which  its 
truth  is  uttered  must  be  in  a  sense  but 
symbols.  But  we  must  claim  for  the  word 
'  sacramental '  an  interpretation  which  guards 
against  perversion  on  the  one  side  or  the 
other.  A  sacrament  is  an  external  truth 
or  action  so  connected  with  an  internal  truth 
or  action  that  it  bears  witness  to  it,  represents 
it,  is  affected  by  it,  and  in  turn  affects  it. 
All  manifestations  of  God  are  sacramental, 
for  they  come  from  Him  and  declare  His 
perfections  and  manifest  His  attributes  un- 
der necessary  limitations.  All  manifestations 
of  fundamental  and  ideal  truth  are  sacra- 
mental for  the  self-same  reason;  they  come 
necessarily    from    the    truth    to    beings    who 


130  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

have  the  capacity  for  receiving  them,  and 
they  both  reveal  and  impart  the  truth. 
Nature  in  her  wonderful  beauty  and  order 
and  might  and  beneficence  is  sacramental; 
she  imparts  a  knowledge  of  God  and  calls 
to  His  worship,  and  as  we  listen  to  her 
voice  and  follow  her  leading  she  brings  to 
us  the  life  of  her  Creator.  Thought  and 
reason  are  sacramental  when  they  turn  upon 
lofty  objects,  and  bid  us  know  the  inner 
meaning  of  things  with  the  secret  of  their 
purpose  and  their  action.  Nothing  which 
is  unseen  is  manifested  except  sacramentally ; 
and  the  mean  whereby  the  reality  and  the 
power  of  the  unseen  is  given  to  us  is  faith. 
The  life  of  faith  in  our  souls  is  therefore 
sacramental,  given  to  us  and  continued  in 
us  by  a  power,  unseen  indeed,  but  of  the 
reality  of  which  we  cannot  doubt;  and  its 
greatest  and  most  necessary  acts  have  to  do 
with  God's  greatest  and  most  efficient  sacra- 
ments, that  by  which  the  true  life  of  the 
soul  is  once  bestowed  and  that  by  which  that 
life  is  ever  derived  and  quickened  and  enabled 
to  grow.  The  special  requisite  for  the  recep- 
tion of  the  benefit  of  each  is  faith.     If  re- 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  131 

pentance  is  put  before  faith  as  required  of 
those  who  come  to  receive  Baptism,  it  is 
because,  in  thought  at  least,  the  knowledge 
of  our  want  must  precede  our  seeking  for 
the  supply  of  that  want;  but  for  supply  of 
our  want  faith  is  necessary,  "  whereby  we 
stedfastly  believe  the  promises  of  God  made 
to  us  in  that  sacrament."  And  in  like  man- 
ner, in  the  Catechism's  enumeration  of  what 
is  required  of  those  who  come  to  the  Lord's 
Supper,  after  the  call  to  repentance  of  former 
sins  and  the  purpose  to  lead  a  new  life,  we 
are  bidden  to  "  have  a  lively  faith  in  God's 
mercy  through  Christ."  In  fact,  in  what 
way  soever  we  regard  the  sacraments  which 
Christ  hath  ordained  in  His  Church,  we  find 
that  they  appeal  to  faith,  to  our  acceptance  of 
God's  promise,  to  our  professing  and  proffer- 
ing allegiance  to  Him,  and  to  our  search  for 
truth  more  profound  and  more  real  than  that 
which  reaches  us  through  our  senses. 

If  we  look  upon  the  sacraments  as  sym- 
bols, as  indeed  all  acknowledge  that  they  are, 
then  in  the  washing  which  cleanses  the  body 
and  in  the  eating  and  drinking  which  main- 
tain its  life  we  find  presented  to  our  souls 


13a  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

an   opportunity   of   their   washing   from   sin 
and  their  strengthening  for  duty  which  can 
come  only  from  God's  action  upon  them  in 
His  forgiving  and  strengthening  grace.     If 
we    recognize    in    the    sacraments    a    mystic 
truth,  then  certain  it  is  that  they  lead  to  the 
union  of  our  souls  with  our  Lord,  in  such  wise 
that  we  enter  into  His  holy  life  and  are  built 
up  in  it.     If  we  speak  of  them  as  spiritual, 
it  can  hardly  be  without  an  acknowledgment 
that  the   spiritual  has  to   do   with   the   very 
centre  of  our  life,   that  the  spiritual  is  the 
source  of  our  existence,  that  it  modifies  and 
controls    all   our   faculties    and    powers,    and 
that  by  it  we  are  brought  under  an  influence 
which  can  change  all  that  we  have  into  the 
reality  of  likeness  to  God.    If  the  sacraments 
have  a  human  side,  as  we  cannot  doubt,  they 
have  to  do  with  man  at  his  best,  or  certainly 
at  the  possibility  of  his  best;  if  they  have  a 
divine   side,  as  confessedly  they  have,   it  is 
because  in  them   God  is  taking  hold   of  us 
and    is    bidding    us    take    hold    of    Himself. 
There  must  be  in  them  a  great  reality,  the 
reality  of  the  spirit,  of  the  unseen,  of  God. 
Therefore     in     whatever     way     we     regard 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  135 

them,  they  call  for  our  apprehension  of  the 
unseen,  our  knowledge  of  God,  our  faith; 
and  thus  they  are  real  things,  not  barren 
figures  of  the  absent,  but  themselves  through 
our  faith  bringing  with  them  that  whereof 
they  tell  and — we  almost  venture  to  say — 
being  that  of  which  they  are  the  assurance. 
What  is  true  of  the  two  sacraments,  prop- 
erly so  called,  is  true  of  every  act  of  the 
Christian  life,  whether  it  seems  mystical  or 
practical,  whether  it  has  to  do  with  worship 
or  with  work.  "  The  life  which  I  now  live, 
I  live  by  faith  in  the  Son  of  God  " ;  so  was 
St.  Paul  writing;  but  he  was  not  content 
to  leave  his  testimony  indefinite,  and  he  ap- 
plied it  to  even  the  lowest  phase  of  his  activity : 
"  The  life  which  I  now  live  in  the  flesh, 
I  live  by  faith."  *  The  power  unseen,  that 
is  to  say,  guided  all  that  he  did;  laying  hold 
on  the  springs  of  being  and  of  action,  it 
made  his  whole  life  sacramental,  real  and 
strong,  because  a  greater  life  was  guiding  it 
and  perfecting  it;  each  outward  and  visible 
act  came  from  an  inward  and  spiritual  grace. 
The  sacramental  life  seeks  for  the  outward 
signs   and   uses   them,   because   of   this   verj^ 

*  Galatians  ii.  20. 


134  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

connection,  and  thus  it  quickens  the  external 
life  with  the  spirit  of  worship,  and  balances 
what  might  else  be  mechanically  practical  by 
the  mystical  atmosphere  which  brightens  it 
and  makes  it  joyful.  The  life  which  finds  its 
inspiration  in  that  tone  of  devotion  and 
work  for  the  Master  which  our  Book  of  Com- 
mon Prayer  so  wonderfully  commends  and 
inculcates  is  the  life  of  faith  and  sacrament, 
the  eternal  life  which  is  already  for  the  be- 
liever a  real  and  enduring  possession. 

IV 

After  what  has  been  said  in  regard  to  our 
faith  in  God  and  in  Jesus  Christ  and  in  the 
Holy  Spirit,  we  shall  not  be  surprised  if 
we  find  the  faith  by  which  we  live — fides  qua 
vivitur — undefinable  and  not  always  able  to 
give  a  full  account  of  itself.  When  we  at- 
tempt to  define  that  which  is  truly  of  faith 
and  sacramental,  we  either  materialize  it  by 
bringing  it  into  the  class  of  things  sensible, 
or  we  evaporate  it  by  denying  to  it  even  the 
property  of  being  apprehensible.  The  ju- 
dicious Hooker  saw  that  to  be  true  of  the 
Lord's  Supper  which  is  true  of  all  matters 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  135 

and  facts  that  are  spiritually  discerned,  that 
men  are  so  determined  to  put  their  thoughts — 
even  their  unsettled  and  controversial  thoughts 
— into  words,  that  the  imperfection  of  their 
statements  makes  their  thoughts  still  less 
adequate  than  before  to  represent  the  truth 
which  in  its  essence  they  believe.*  If  men — 
so  in  substance  he  pleaded — would  but  agree 
to  profess  and  teach  that  as  to  which  they  are 
in  agreement,  great  would  be  the  beauty 
and  the  power  of  their  utterance;  the  high- 
est revelation  would  inspire  but  praise,  the 
deepest  mysteries  would  teach  but  humble 
adoration.  So  plead  the  thoughtful  leaders 
of  men  in  our  own  day.  Men's  beliefs  lie 
beneath  their  words,  and  we  can  often  see, 
and  often  confidently  assume,  that  they  are 
in  harmony  when  their  expression  is  in- 
harmonious if  not  inconsistent.  In  our  pri- 
vate devotions  as  we  prepare  for  the  reception 
of  the  greatest  of  sacraments,  and  in  the 
worship  of  the  congregation  as  we  draw  near 
in  faith,  we  pass  beneath  the  simple  phrasing 
of  our  own  prayers  or  above  the  dignified 
utterance    of   our   historic   liturg}%    to   know 

*  Laws  of  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  V.   xvii.  12. 


136  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

Who  it  is  Whose  voice  speaks  to  our  souls 
and  why  we  are  following  the  guidance  of 
His  voice.  It  may  be  that,  if  we  were 
called  to  give  utterance  to  our  faith,  we 
should  not  use  the  words  which  would  come 
to  the  lips  of  the  scholarly  priest  who  min- 
isters to  us,  or  the  words  which  would  be 
used  by  the  thankful  saint  or  the  penitent 
sinner  who  kneels  at  our  side;  but  we  know, 
to  use  Hooker's  phrase,  the  cogitations  which 
possess  the  soul  of  each  faithful  communi- 
cant: "  O  my  God,  Thou  art  true;  O  my 
soul,  thou  art  happy." 

The  words  of  controversy  or  of  explanation 
are  not  necessary  for  the  faith  of  the  life, 
the  belief  of  the  soul;  and  the  pious  con- 
troversialist— for  such  there  are — falls  back 
on  simple  faith  in  the  hour  of  repentance, 
of  thanksgiving,  of  communion  with  his 
Lord.  That  simple  faith  does  not  differ 
greatly  in  truly  devout  souls.  It  witnesses 
the  essential  fact  that  man  is  brought  near 
to  God,  that  man  trusts  God  and  surrenders 
himself  to  Him  to  receive  blessing  and  to 
render  service,  and  that  thus  man  knows 
God  as  God  knows  him.     It  does  not  make 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  137 

little  of  the  external  act,  for  that  is  of  the 
very  nature  of  sacrament;  but  it  passes 
through  it  to  the  great  spiritual  truth  which 
it  represents  and  to  which  it  leads:  "that 
the  person  baptized  may  receive  the  everlast- 
ing benediction  of  God's  heavenly  washing," 
that  the  believing  communicant  may  become 
a  "  partaker  of  Christ's  most  precious  Body 
and  Blood,"  "  his  sinful  body  being  made 
clean  by  Christ's  Body  and  his  soul  washed 
through  Christ's  Blood." 

But  the  sacramental  life,  as  we  have  noted 
already,  is  not  confined  to  the  faithful  use  of 
the  two  great  sacraments,  though  it  can  be 
seen  in  every  deed  to  be  based  upon  them, 
nor  yet  to  the  blessing  which  reaches  us 
through  other  ordinances  that  are  rightly 
termed  sacramental.  It  is  the  whole  life  of 
the  Christian  as  it  is  consciously  lived  within 
the  covenant.  It  is  hidden  with  Christ  in 
God,  and  therefore  it  is  in  all  its  parts 
Christian  and  divine.  Its  principle  is  sim- 
ple, its  manifestations  are  many  and  com- 
plicated, its  methods  and  its  powers  are 
beyond  the  ability  of  tongue  to  express  or 
even  of  mind  to  conceive;  and  while  its  stay 


138  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

is  the  faith,  the  Creed  with  its  witness  to 
faith  and  the  Faith,  its  reality  does  not 
depend  upon  it;  rather  it  testifies  to  the 
reahty  of  which  the  Creed  is  the  expression. 
Study,  as  carefully  as  you  will  and  dare, 
any  good  disciple  in  whom  you  recognize 
the  life  of  faith;  and  you  will  be  able  to 
discern  the  realities  on  which  it  rests  and 
the  facts  to  which  it  testifies;  they  are  the 
facts  of  what  we  call  the  Faith,  but  the 
realities  are  those  of  faith  as  the  fundamen- 
tal principle. 


Thus  then  we  see  in  the  Christian  life  the 
same  principle  which  is  strikingly  illustrated 
in  the  Christian  profession.  Its  central  act 
or  fact  is  allegiance  to  God,  and  union  with 
Him;  and  this  allegiance  and  union  with  the 
divine,  with  Father  and  Son  and  Holy 
Spirit,  is  expressed  in  thought  and  in  speech 
by  simple  utterances,  the  value  of  which  is 
enhanced  as  they  express  the  faith  of  a  body 
of  believing  people;  for  they,  conscious  of 
one  life,  utter  each  his  "I  believe  "  with  the 
strength  and  the  challenge  of  a  common  con- 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  139 

viction  and  a  common  duty,  yes  and  with 
the  energy  of  a  common  inspiration.  As 
members  of  the  body,  the  organic  company 
of  those  who  have  been  called  into  the  life 
of  Christ  that  they  may  believe  in  Him  and 
know  Him,  and  who  have  come  to  believe 
in  Him  and  know  Him  that  they  may  par- 
take yet  more  fully  of  His  Spirit  and  His 
life,  they  have  a  unity  more  close  and  com- 
plete than  can  possibly  be  found  or  held 
in  any  other  way;  they  believe  in  one  God, 
they  know  and  hold  allegiance  to  one  Lord, 
they  have  the  life  of  one  Spirit.  That 
faith,  that  allegiance,  that  life,  are  great 
realities,  destined  to  endure  and  to  become 
more  strong  through  the  experience  of  one 
who  has  them — yet  not  without  the  danger 
that  by  his  own  fault  they  may  be  weakened 
or  even  lost.  And  the  fact  that  they  can  be 
attained  and  held  in  no  other  way  than  by 
acceptance  of  the  truth  makes  it  necessary 
that  those  who  hold  them  shall  unite  in  their 
recognition  of  the  truth,  that  they  who  are 
one  body  because  they  hold  one  faith  and 
are  in  allegiance  to  one  Lord  shall  confess 
one    Creed.      But    here,    as    elsewhere,    alle- 


140  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

giance  lies  back  of  the  Creed,  and  faith  pre- 
pares the  way  for  the  Faith. 

With  creeds,  the  expression  of  the  essen- 
tials of  our  belief  in  words,  we  should  place, 
I  think.  Christian  worship  and  Christian 
ordinances,  the  expressions  of  our  belief  in 
acts,  and  those  the  acts  of  a  body  of  be- 
lievers. It  is  no  little  thing  that  all  Western 
Christendom  is  content  to  use  a  very  ancient 
and  simple  baptismal  creed  as  a  sufficient 
statement  of  its  Christian  faith,  of  the  faith 
of  its  myriad  congregations,  of  the  faith  of 
its  innumerable  members.  And  it  is  even 
more  wonderful  that  all  Christendom,  East- 
ern and  Western,  when  in  the  Eucharistic 
service  it  wishes  to  make  a  more  explicit 
defence  of  its  faith,  should  still  be  content 
to  use  words  which  come  from  the  councils 
of  the  fourth  and  fifth  centuries.  The  rea- 
son is  that  these  formularies  do  so  express 
and  guard  that  to  which  the  faith  and  rea- 
son of  believers  have  long  and  unitedly  given 
assent,  that  we  know  the  certainty  and  the 
reasonableness  of  their  interpretation,  and 
that  the  tone  of  controversy,  absent  from  the 
one,   has   in   the   other   become   an   acknowl- 


THE  LIFE  OF  FAITH  141 

edgment  of  the  victory  of  truth  and  faith. 
And  the  daily  offices,  with  psalms  and  les- 
sons and  hymns  and  prayers,  the  sacramental 
services  with  words  of  confession  and  obla- 
tion and  adoration,  the  special  services  for 
the  most  solemn  occasions  in  life — these  are 
all  professions  of  faith,  applicable  to  the 
needs  of  any  human  being  who  within  the 
covenant  looks  for  the  blessings  covenanted 
by  faith.  As  with  the  Creeds,  so  with  the 
Church's  other  formularies;  all  who  have 
Christian  faith  as  the  rule  of  their  lives, 
all  whose  lives  are  lived  in  the  faith  of  the 
Son  of  God,  the  Saviour,  may  enter  into  the 
Church's  worship;  for  she  has  confidence  that 
their  faith  finds  its  expression  in  her  Faith, 
or — if  we  may  so  phrase  it — that  she  may 
make  her  Faith  the  expressions  of  their  al- 
legiance and  their  belief.  Thus  one  great 
principle  runs  through  all  true  religious  life, 
and  faith  is  the  victory  that  overcometh  the 
world. 


The  thought  which  has  in  my  mind  under- 
lain the  argument  of  these  lectures  has  an 


142  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

application,  I  think,  to  some  controverted 
matters  which  hardly  ought  to  be  matters  of 
controversy  at  all.  If  the  faith  uttered  in 
words  is  an  attempt  to  express  faith  which 
really  exists  in  the  soul,  then,  while  our  re- 
sponsibility for  a  right  expression  is  great, 
the  value  of  the  belief  exceeds  the  value  of 
the  form  of  words  in  which  it  is  stated.  If 
faith  in  God  leads  us  to  faith  in  God's  Son 
and  Word  and  Spirit,  it  is  not  necessary 
that  always  and  everywhere  we  should  insist 
on  the  use  of  words  which  have  never  passed 
into  the  Creeds  and  are  not  employed  theo- 
logically in  the  Prayer  Book.  If  faith  in 
Jesus  Christ  means  for  us  that  He  is  the 
eternal  Son  who  has  taken  man's  nature 
that  He  may  bring  man  to  God,  then  the 
technical  terms  needed  for  no  other  purpose 
than  to  establish  that  faith — none  of  them, 
except  '  being  of  one  substance  with,'  *  hav- 
ing been  brought  into  formal  use — ma}^  not 
be  thought  of  as  under  all  circumstances 
necessary  for  Christian  fellowship  and  Chris- 
tian life.  If  the  life  of  faith  is  the  life  of  all 
Christian  men,  then  we  may  not  make  it  a 

*  ofioovoiog. 


FAITH  IN  THE  SPIRIT  143 

condition  of  recognition  of  this  life  that  the 
manner  of  its  reception  or  its  progress  should 
be  described  in  the  same  terms  by  all  those 
who  use  its  appointed  means.  The  old  terms, 
made  more  valuable  by  continued  use,  will 
doubtless  long  continue  in  lands  in  which  the 
Greek  influence  prevails  in  language  and  in 
philosophy;  but  in  the  case  of  nations  out- 
side of  that  influence,  some  of  which  we  are 
now  seeking  to  call  into  the  Church,  we 
must  not  lay  such  stress  on  the  phraseology 
of  the  confession  as  to  imperil  the  reception 
of  that  faith  which  alone  can  give  it  value. 
And  among  ourselves,  whose  duty  it  is 
so  to  present  the  ancient  faith  that  it  may 
be  accepted  by  the  honest  and  true  hearts  of 
a  new  generation — a  generation  which  is  pas- 
sionately seeking  for  truth, — we  must  be- 
ware lest  we  insist,  or  seem  to  insist,  on 
formulas  when  we  mean  to  lay  stress  on 
truth;  and  above  all  we  must  beware  lest 
by  putting  our  own  glosses  upon  accepted 
forms  of  words  we  narrow  the  truth  which 
they  do  really  convey,  narrow  the  generous 
faith  which  consents  to  them,  and  even  nar- 
row the  company  of  faithful  people  who  can 


144  FAITH  AND  THE  FAITH 

honestly  worship  and  serve  in  accordance 
with  them.  Our  Prayer  Book  represents  a 
generosity  of  worship,  as  our  Creeds — and  I 
do  not  hesitate  to  add  our  Articles — repre- 
sent a  generosity  of  faith;  each  can  be  held 
with  absolute  fidelity  to  the  authority  of 
Scripture  and  of  the  Church,  because  each 
can  be  held  with  absolute  fidelity  to  faith 
tested  by  reason,  which  is  our  personal  reli- 
ance on  God,  the  inspiration  of  our  fidelity 
to  Him,  the  source  of  our  knowledge  of 
Him,  the  very  victory  in  which  stands  our 
salvation.  That  faith  shall  ever  remain  in  the 
souls  of  men,  in  the  Creeds  of  the  Church, 
in  sacramental  worship,  and  in  spiritual  life; 
it  must  be  tried,  as  it  has  been  and  is  tried; 
but  it  shall  grow  stronger  in  all  the  ages, 
and  its  hymns  of  victory  shall  never  cease 
to  echo  in  "  heaven's  eternal  arches." 

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